Scientists and manufacturers like working with synthetic fibres because of their consistency.
That’s something natural fibres don’t offer, which is why they have proven so hard to integrate into industrial products, say French developers of flax-based industrial products.
However, analysis and lots of data can minimize the natural unevenness of crop-based fibres and make them easier to deal with.
“We know just a little about the influence of the structure, the composition and the morphology of the fibres on mechanical behavior,” said Mousse Gomina, a research scientist specializing in natural materials with the CRISMAT laboratory in Caen, France, who spoke at the recent BioFibe 2013 conference in Winnipeg.
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“All the concepts developed for synthetic fibres are now applied to plant fibres, but I think that is not the good one. We need to develop new concepts for these fibres.”
BioFibe 2013 brought together entrepreneurs, financiers, researchers, government agencies, lawyers and farmers hoping to further exploit the potential of natural fibres such as flax and wheat straw. There has been some development of the biofibre industry, but it is far less than enthusiasts have been hoping for since at least the mid-1990s.
Most biofibre applications are still being developed or are on the drawing board, although conference participants heard from a successful prairie wheat straw-based paper maker and got to see material providers showcase their products.
The potential of fibres such as flax and wheat have been noted for decades. Flax fibres have been used for centuries in textile and other light uses in Europe.
However, getting natural fibres into higher-tech products has been hard because of the technical challenges that have faced researchers such as Gomina and colleague Davy Duriatti of France’s Depestele, a flax fibre products company.
“These fibres are not the same,” said Duriatti, summing up the huge range of variations between one natural fibre and another in the same crop and within single strands.
Gomina said carbon and glass fibres are easy to use for industrial products because there are few unknowns. However, plant fibres vary in thickness, can be affected by pathogens and pests and are structurally different at different places along the plant stem.
“These problems are now preventing the utilization of these fibres for technical applications,” said Gomina.
For example, when fibres vary in thickness by more than 100 percent, “which diameter can you use to derive the strength?”
However, research is allowing de-velopers to compensate for natural variability. As well, Duriatti said extensive crop production analysis is revealing much about how agronomic practices affect the final fibre product. If crop production methods can be customized to encourage consistency, “that’s very important to reduce this variability.”
Duriatti said there is great interest from the automotive and aerospace industries for using biofibres in the composite materials that they rely on to lighten cars and aircraft.
