This paper presents a comprehensive characterisation of wood flour geometry for polylactic acid (PLA) wood plastic composites (bioWPCs), and hence explores how the wood flour may influence the microstructure and performance of bioWPCs. The results show that current characterisation of wood flour from the literature can be misleading as they mostly rely on sieve analysis. Image analysis was used to critically study the fibres retained at various mesh sizes to investigate and examine the length and width distributions of the fibres prior to and after processing into bioWPCs. There were clear relationships between the reduction in both fibre size and aspect ratio and compounding processes depending on the original fibre geometry. It was also determined that by sieving out only the fibres retained at 500 µm much stronger bioWPCs can be produced than that using a single size fibre, achieving tensile and flexural stress of 15.3 and 13.2 MPa, respectively.

本文介绍了用于聚乳酸（PLA）木塑复合材料（bioWPCs）的木粉几何形状的全面表征，因此探讨了木粉如何影响bioWPC的微观结构和性能。结果表明，文献中对木粉的当前表征可能会产生误导，因为它们主要依靠筛分分析。图像分析用于严格研究保留在各种筛孔尺寸的纤维，以研究和检查加工成bioWPC之前和之后的纤维长度和宽度分布。取决于原始纤维的几何形状，纤维尺寸和长宽比的降低与复合工艺之间存在明显的关系。