The tourist sector in Mauritius is aiming at welcoming 2 million tourists by the year 2015 and coming up with creative ideas and products branded with 'Made in Mauritius' to boost the country's craft sector. This project looks into the manufacture of paper-yarn. Different types of paper were cut into ribbons of varying widths and converted into yarn by two methods: twisting and folding. The folds were made along the axis of a ribbon while twisting required prior moistening and was carried out on a modified yarn-twist measuring device. The relationship between the number of folds/twists and the strength of the resulting paper yarn was investigated. Yarn of high quality can be obtained by twisting ribbons of relatively smaller widths or folding relatively wider ribbons. The yarn can be used for manufacturing craft products.
Replacing synthetic fibres with natural ones is key for clean and sustainable manufacturing. Natural fibres require characterization to investigate their usefulness. However, current testing methodologies require a large sample size due to the strong variation of tensile strength (TS) among the fibre of the same plant species. The development of a simpler test method to predict fibre TS would help in the selection of the most appropriate plant species with desirable TS values while performing fewer tests; thus saving on time and cost. FT-IR results that determine fibre crystallinity through specific IR absorbance peak ratios may serve to predict the fibre TS. In this study, we tested the relationship between fibre TS and cellulose crystallinity for seven different species of Pandanus spp. Thus, empirical mathematical relationships between the fibre TS value and indices obtained by three specific IR absorbance peaks ratios, namely the total crystallinity index, lateral order index, and hydrogen bond index have been established with a good correlation coefficient (96, 98, and 95%, respectively).
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