The agricultural sector produces large quantities of agricultural residues every year during the production of fodder and other plants. Most of these have no other use than to be used as fertilizer or incinerated as waste. Thus, even in the production of hops (grown because of the cones used to produce beer) we produce large amounts of unused biomass. In the spring, the hop root is pruned to remove the annual woody shoots, which are removed from the field and burned. In our graduation thesis, we used these one-year-old hop shoots to make particles for chipboard, wood-plastic composite, and sandwich composite. The density, humidity, thickness swelling, modulus of elasticity, bending strength, tensile strength and internal bond strength were determined. The obtained results were compared with reference panel made of coniferous chips. We found that the bonds between the particles are strong enough to withstand the loads. The use of hops has a positive effect on thickness swelling, and is practical for the production of WPC and sandwich composites.
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