Hints For Using Wood Flour Selecting the proper species of wood flour and the proper mesh size will make processing easier, faster, and safer. Always keep your process temperatures as low as possible.  Temperatures below 395°F or 200°C are recommended to keep wood flour from burning. Always allow for adequate venting.  The moisture driven off by the extrusion process must be able to escape the extruder, thereby cutting down on both temperature and pressure. Pre-drying the wood flour to under 1% moisture content can be very helpful in processing – wood flour with less moisture is actually less likely to burn. Increasing the resin MFI will decrease the heat within the screw by cutting down on the shear from the wood flour. Allow for two or three mixing zones in your screw configuration.  The more uniform the mixing is, the lower your process temperature will be. If you are using a single screw extruder, consider using a compounded pellet. Twin screw extruders seem to work better than single screw extruders for wood filled plastics.  Contact your extruder manufacturer for further details. Look for high wood flour integrity!  Proper dryness with no foreign material is extremely important to the compounding process. 2006 P.J. Murphy Forest Products Corp. | P.O. Box 300 Montville, NJ 07045 | Phone: 800-631-1936 | Fax: 973-316-9455