Bio-oil from biomass is considered as a potential substitute to partially replace phenol in the preparation of phenol formaldehyde resin as replacement to the commercial phenol which high in cost. However, the percentages of bio-oil substitutions need to be determined to ensure that the performance is good as the commercial ones. The aim of this research is to identify the optimum conditions for synthesizing phenol formaldehyde resin (PF) and determines the percentages of bio-oil substitutions by manipulating the synthesizing variables such as formaldehyde to phenol (F/P) catalyst ratio (NaOH/P), catalyst ratio and duration using one-factor-at-time method. The effect of each manipulated variables on shear strength was compared to the Chinese National Standard for PF resin shear strength. Bio-based phenolic resins are synthesized using the optimum conditions by replacing 10, 20, 30 and 40% of phenol with bio-oil from the pyrolysis of sugarcane bagasse. The results obtained shown that the optimum conditions to synthesize phenol formaldehyde resin is at F/P molar ratio of 2.0, catalyst ratio of 0.6 and duration of 3 hour. The results of bio-based phenolic resins bonding performance shows that substitution percentage of bio-oil up to 20% at most gives good performance compared to the pure PF resin.
