Plant fiber lab
Nettle, hemp, hops or oil flax - these plants stand for much more than weeds, drugs, beer or oil. They provide high-quality fibres that are not only interesting for the production of textiles, but can also be used for building or insulating materials in industry, and thus replace fossil raw materials.
In addition to known and unknown fibre plants, we are particularly interested in lignocellulose-containing biomasses from the coupled and residual use of food and feed plants or energy sources.
In the technical lab we have machinery and equipment from small to pilot scale for the preparation and processing of fibre plants. In addition to the mechanical preparation of dry biomasses by means of impaction and grinding, these also allow particle disintegration of moist raw materials by means of extruders or disk mills.
In the facility, intermediates can be further processed into board-shaped end products after the addition of auxiliary materials.
For all processing stages, analytical capacities with appropriate equipment are available, for example a scanning electron microscope for structural analysis, a general purpose testing machine for determining mechanical properties as well as chemical analysis.
For more information see program area "Multifunctional biomaterials"
