**5. Manufacturing of composite board from oil palm fronds**

The oil palm frond composite boards used in this study were made on a laboratory scale but follow the ISO standard. The oil palm fronds had been processed as compressed oil palm fronds to form such a potential composite board in this topic. The leaflets and epidermis are first manually removed from the fronds by a scraper. They were then sliced longitudinally into thin layers and compressed into 2-3 mm in thickness. The material was then air-dried under the shed before added with 12-15% of phenol and urea-formaldehyde resins and hot-pressed into composite boards.

**Figure 19.** *Layers of palm oil fronds being compressed using a hotpress machine.*

**Figure 20.** *Composite board from compressed oil palm fronds were trimmed.*

Hardner NH4Cl at 1% later added forming layers which were compressed into 350 mm (length)350 mm (width) x 20 mm (thickness) boards. This was done by transferring the material to a single-opening hydraulic hot-pressed machine with a platen temperature of 1255°C for phenol-formaldehyde resin and 1005°C for urea-formaldehyde resin and pressed into the desired shape for subsequent testing.

The composite board from compressed oil palm fronds was pressed using a three-step-down method of pressing among 40 secs/mm for phenol-formaldehyde resin, meanwhile 30 secs/mm for urea-formaldehyde resin. Thickness spacing bars of 20 mm thick were inserted between the hot platens during hot pressing to ensure the desired board thickness is shown in **Figure 19**. All these composite boards were trimmed as shown in **Figure 20** and cut into various size test specimens and then conditioned at 203°C and 653% relative humidity (RH) for 72 hours prior for testing to produce equilibrium moisture content of about 121%. More samples of the composite board from compressed oil palm fronds were shown in **Figures 21**–**24**.

**Figure 21.** *Front view of the compressed oil palm fronds board.*

**Figure 22.** *The compressed oil palm fronds boards can be laminating with veneers.*

*Processing and Properties of Oil Palm Fronds Composite Boards from* Elaeis guineensis *DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98222*

**Figure 23.** *The compressed oil palm fronds boards at differences thickness.*

#### **Figure 24.**

*High-performance micrograph of the phenol-formaldehyde composite board from compressed oil palm fronds at the longitudinal sectional view (2 magnification).*
