Our investigations related to surface treat soy meals using alkylorganosilanes surface treatments and polymeric surface treatments with reactive oil carriers have demonstrated the ability to provide hydrophobicity to particleboard wood composites. Based on the positive results from these studies we continue to our exploration a variety of other surface treatments. In addition, we repeated some of the soak studies on particleboard to verify the results. The new tests verified that it is possible to use surface treated soy meal as a hydrophobic replacement for petroleum waxes. We are currently evaluating methods for scaling up the surface treatment preparation methods so that we can conduct larger scale testing.

The possibility of replacing petroleum based waxes as hydrophobes for wood composites by using surface treated soy meal as the hydrophobic treatment is of great interest to the wood composites industry. Using surface treated soy meal in this application would result in the need for tens of millions of pounds of soy meal.