OpenAlex · 2026-07-28
Researchers testing waterborne acrylic coatings on flattened bamboo panels found that more coating isn't always better: the amount of finish needed to make paint stick well depends on which part of the bamboo you're coating, since nodes and internodes (and inner vs outer layers) behave differently under stress.
Coating thickness increased from about 50.6 μm to 60.8 μm as the applied load rose from 60 to 100 g/m², but the increase wasn't proportional and didn't translate into steadily better adhesion.
The inner-internode region showed a non-monotonic adhesion response, peaking at 0.47 MPa pull-off strength at 80 g/m² before dropping to 0.22 MPa at 100 g/m².
Finite-element stress modeling showed the weakest-performing region in real tests wasn't the region with the highest simulated interfacial shear stress, meaning local stiffness and porous structure matter more than stress alone.
