engleski

Bio-innovative flax retting

Flax (Linum usitatissimum L.) is an important commercial crop that supplies both linseed and bast fibres for multiple applications. Retting, which is a microbial process, separates industrially useful bast fibres from non-fibre stem tissues. While several methods (i.e., water- and dew-retting) are used to ret flax, more recently enzymes have been evaluated to replace currently used methods. The enzymes remove the noncellulosic compounds from the technical fibres, and at the same time are biodegradable and non-toxic, with no dependence on the weather conditions. Therefore, in this paper an enzymatic retting was researched, and its influence to the flax quality. Comparing the properties of enzyme-retted flax fibres the properties of water-retted ones, it can be found that enzymatic retted fibres are coarser, but much stronger. The results have shown that the strongest fibre was achieved with bath having enzyme concentration 0.2 % with similar fineness compared with other bath concentration. Therefore, this concentration can be considered as optimal one. The use of enzymes to extract fibres provides an environmentally friendly method toward developing reliable and sustainable agriculture using bio- based fibres of enhance quality.

Flax fibres; enzymatic retting; fineness; tenacity

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