**2.1 Particleboard**

Particleboard is a man-made board made of wood or other lignocellulosic materials made of scraps, applied adhesive, and then glued under the action of heat and pressure; the physical photograph of particleboard is shown as **Figure 3**. As the population grows, so does the market demand for particleboard, and over-exploitation of forest resources has led to a shortage of wood supply in most developing countries. The scarcity of timber resources has limited the development of the particleboard industry; therefore, in addition to timber by-products, some plant raw materials (e.g., bagasse, bamboo, bark, rice husk, etc.) are gradually being used. Bekalo and Reinhardt [6] investigated the process and properties of particleboard prepared from coffee husks. Coffee husk is a coffee processing residue and currently, coffee husk is rarely utilized in Germany and is usually incinerated or landfilled or poured into river water. Akinyemi et al. [7] prepared composite particle boards from waste materials such as corn cobs and wood chips. The effect of waste dosage on the physical and mechanical properties of particleboards was investigated by fixing the volume of adhesive. The results showed that the higher the composition of corn cobs, the faster the boards were saturated by water. The best physical properties were obtained at 50% corn cob

*Introductory Chapter: Engineering Wood Review DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112866*

**Figure 2.** *Types of EWPs.*

composition and the worst at 100%. Nikvash et al. [8] investigated the properties of three crop processing residues, bagasse, rape straw, and industrial hemp straw, for the preparation of 3-layer structured particleboard. Bagasse was purchased from Iran and rape straw and industrial hemp straw were purchased from Germany. Bagasse, rape straw, and industrial hemp straw were processed into 6 mm long shavings and dried to a moisture content of 3–4%. The surface layer shavings were wood shavings made in Germany, and the core layer shavings consisted of bagasse, rape straw, and industrial hemp straw mixed with wood shavings according to a certain proportion, respectively.
