OSU Professor Finds Opportunities Along Oregon’s Highways

When Oregon BEST researcher and OSU professor of wood science and engineering Lech Muszynski was looking for items made of plastic that could potentially be manufactured using wood-plastic composites containing woody biomass, he didn’t have to look far.

From his car, he noticed many things along the highway that fit the bill: from the bright orange traffic cones, barrels, and dividers used at construction sites to the tiny plastic reflectors glued to highway surfaces to delineate traffic lanes.

When he looked closer, he saw metal guard rails, concrete sound barriers, and other items made of non-renewable resources that could potentially be made from wood-plastic composites.

Muszynski knew about the stream of woody biomass generated by expensive wild fire prevention operations such as forest thinning and fuel removal. He sensed an opportunity to add more value to the biomass by using it in products found along highways instead of burning it onsite or processing it for a source of energy.

“Our research is focused on putting woody biomass into the transportation-related products that you pass every day and don’t think anything about,” says Muszynski, ticking off a list of possibilities. “Guard rails, snow fences, mileposts, sign panels, traffic dividers, sound barriers—you name it. Our goal is to make wood composite products that may contain up to 70 percent biomass instead of petroleum-based plastics.”

Of course these products must be tested to ensure they will tolerate exposure to sunlight, temperature changes, and moisture. But Muszynski is in the midst of a feasibility study that he believes will give Oregon the opportunity to be the leader of highway perimeter products made of wood composites.

“The beauty of composites is that you can utilize low grades of woody biomass and still engineer the properties much more than when you just harvest lumber and use it as solid wood,” says Muszynski, whose research expertise includes mechanical performance of wood-based composites and advanced hybrid wood-plastic composites, with a special focus on performance, bonding, durability, damage assessment, and fracture properties.

“You can also substitute small amounts of biomass into current plastic products without having to change the manufacturing process or the design, and whenever you can do that, you save resources,” he says.

Muszynski believes wood composites manufacturing can solve several problems at the same time: utilization of woody biomass removed by wild fire prevention operations; reduction in the use of limited resources like concrete, metals, and premium petroleum-based plastics; and the creation of new jobs in small communities that have been dependent on the timber industry for generations.

“The equipment used to manufacture wood-plastic composite products can be set up in a barn or warehouse in these small towns to provide jobs,” he says. “And the end products are far easier to transport than the woody biomass itself.”

Although wood composites have been around for years, with mixed success (think composite decking and siding), Muszynski believes that the ubiquitous, relatively low-tech, products related to highway infrastructure provide better opportunities for utilization of significant volumes of biomass, especially since it can be locally harvested, locally processed and locally used.

“Why not look for opportunities at the lower risk, lower tech end of the spectrum, such as traffic dividers, snow fences, or sound barriers?” Muszynski asks. “If we can prove something like that will work, it moves the imagination of entrepreneurs into other areas, and other applications can be explored.”

Muszynski is in touch with the Oregon Dept. of Transportation, and when the feasibility study is complete this fall, he’ll be looking for industry partners to commercialize his research.

“I’m confident that at the end of the study, we’ll be able to deliver specific guidelines for the assessment of feasibility of the biomass substitution in products and hopefully proof that this will work,” he says. “So we’re interested in talking with entrepreneurs.”

Muszynski credits Oregon BEST for helping connect him to people and organizations that can help push his research toward commercialization.

“The affiliation with Oregon BEST has really opened my eyes to the great potential for commercialization and to the social aspects of our research,” he says. “Oregon BEST introduced me to community leaders, private forestland owners, and local entrepreneurs who are concerned with the costs of fire prevention operations and with saving local jobs. In talking with these people, I realized that using local biomass to produce infrastructure-related products seemed a viable way of creating jobs and utilizing local resources while reducing reliance on non-renewable resources.”

A native of Poland, Muszynski received his master’s degree in wood technology and his PhD in forestry and wood technology from the Agricultural University of Poznań. From 1998 to 2004 he worked in the Advanced Engineered Wood Composites Center at the University of Maine, where he was involved in research projects on wood composite materials for the Federal Highway Administration and for U.S. Naval docks.

He believes that thinking outside the box will lead to using wood composites in many current products.
“The goal of sound barriers, for example, is to shield residents from highway noise, so they don’t necessarily have to be made of concrete,” he says. “In Europe, they use a variety of light composite materials for sound barriers.”

His research looks at the micromechanics of wood composites, exploring how the irregularly shaped wood particles interact with the polymer matrix on a very small scale.

“It’s all about engineering the properties of composites by looking at the micromechanics,” he says. “For example, can we strategically place materials in particular parts of a product? What is the value of orienting the wood particles a certain way during the processing? We’re learning more and more about how these particles interact with the polymer, and in the process discovering endless possibilities that come from that knowledge.”

Watch for the results of Muszynski’s research as it is commercialized in the coming years, probably along Oregon’s highways.