Innovation Anthology #268:

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OSB or oriented strand board was first invented by the Alberta Research Council.

Now the Council has introduced a new generation of panelboard called OSSB.

Only this time instead of using wood chips, the structural board is manufactured from wheat straw.

Wayne Wasylciw is the technical director of the ARC’s forest products business unit.

WAYNE WASYLCIW: Well unfortunately straw is a tube, not a strand when it’s made by mother nature. So if you try to take a tube and apply a resin to all the surfaces and then try to form it into a panel, well you’re only getting resin on half the strand, because when you press it together, of course, the inside of the tube doesn’t get any resin. We’ve developed the technology here to split the straw tube, make the straw tube as long as possible. We can put it through the same processes as we do with wood OSB in the manufacturing process. We can take the material, run it through the same blending machines, run it through the same mat forming devices, run it through the same press with similar resins. And we’ve got a product that’s equivalent and in some cases superior to to wood based OSB.

Wayne Wasylciw says a Dutch company has licensed the wheat straw technology to build the first OSSB plant in China.

Thanks today to the Alberta Research Council.

I’M CHERYL CROUCHER

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Alberta Research Council

Established as the first provincial research organization in Canada, the Alberta Research Council is 85 years old. The Alberta Research Council (ARC) develops and commercializes technologies to give customers a competitive advantage. A leader in innovation, ARC provides solutions globally to the energy, life sciences, agriculture, environment, forestry and manufacturing sectors.
ARC performs about five per cent of the roughly $1.5 billion in R&D done in Alberta each year, and generates revenues of approximately $84 million per year. ARC operates from five sites across the province in Edmonton, Calgary, Vegreville and Devon and employs more than 600 highly-skilled people.

In January 2010, under the new Alberta Innovation Framework, the Alberta Research Council was restructured and incorporated into the new provincial agency Alberta Innovates Technology Futures.

Program Date: 2009-11-17