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Substantial size reduction of banana fibres and enhancement of fibre properties achieved through a single mechanical treatment

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posted on 2022-09-01, 14:07 authored by Piyushaa Devi Emrith, Hareenanden Ramasawmy, Dinesh Surroop, Diganta DasDiganta Das

This study aims to encourage the large scale production of micro-cellulose fibres (MCF), especially in developing economies. Micro-fibres have been extracted from banana pseudo-stem agro-wastes to valorise the latter. The particularity of this study is that a commercial food wet grinder, an equipment necessitating less investment cost as compared to the traditional supermass colloider (SMC) machine, has been employed to yield micro-fibres. For enabling maximum controllability of the process, the effect of two grinding parameters (the gap distance and the number of passes) were investigated. The results revealed the viability of such a mechanical equipment: from SEM results, 95% reduction in fibre diameter (comparable to the 99% size reduction for the SMC machine) and from XRD results, high percentage crystallinity (76–80% corresponding to an increase of 25–30%) were obtained. The optimal conditions resulting in these conditions were: smallest possible gap distance (800 µm) and highest number of passes (30). Another singularity of this study is that the gap distance proved to be more important than the number of passes in terms of the fibre diameter reduction, lignin and hemicellulose reduction, crystallinity and fibrillation. Lignin and hemicellulose, despite having been decreased to 13% and 7–9% respectively during the process, have been observed to enhance fibrillation. Thus, a high degree of fibrillation (yielding micro-fibres of diameter 1–2 µm) was obtained at a relatively low power consumption (4.1 kWh/kg fibre). Finally, a detailed explanatory mechanism based on the literature-reported viscoelasticity of lignin has been given to explain how it facilitates fibrillation.

Funding

Higher Education Commission, Mauritius

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Chemical Engineering

Published in

Waste and Biomass Valorization

Volume

14

Issue

4

Pages

1369-1389

Publisher

Springer

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Publisher statement

This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review (when applicable) and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use, but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12649-022-01929-0

Acceptance date

2022-08-30

Publication date

2022-09-07

Copyright date

2022

ISSN

1877-2641

eISSN

1877-265X

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Diganta Das. Deposit date: 31 August 2022

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