Xinjiang researchers develop new technology to obtain carbon fiber from waste cotton linters

On the 22nd, the reporter learned from the Xinjiang Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that the researchers of the Institute of Resources Chemistry have developed a new process for environmentally friendly and low-cost preparation of carbon fiber based on the transformation of Xinjiang resources and using waste cotton linters as raw materials. .

The above research results have been published in the International Journal of Sustainable Green Chemistry and Engineering, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. This green, low-cost process is biomass-based carbon fiber. The preparation provides a new approach.

It is reported that carbon fiber is widely used in aviation and sports industries as a high-performance fiber material. The traditional method for preparing carbon fiber is based on petrochemical energy sources such as polypropylene and mesophase pitch, but due to the non-renewability of fossil energy and the generation of pollutants in the process of preparing carbon fiber (such as cyanide in the process of preparing PAN-based carbon fiber). Hydrogen toxic gas), thereby polluting the environment. Therefore, it is of great significance to develop environmentally-friendly and low-cost carbon fiber preparation processes using renewable and non-toxic natural resources as raw materials.

Researchers at the Xinjiang Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said that the process not only recycles the discarded cotton linters, but also produces regenerated cellulose fibers, and uses this as a raw material to develop a process for preparing high value-added carbon fibers. In the process of preparing carbon fiber, the environmentally friendly CarbaCell method is adopted. Compared with the traditional method for preparing regenerated cellulose, the process is not only simple in production process (no aging, mixing, maturation, etc.), but also in the process of preparing regenerated cellulose fibers. No toxic pollutants such as carbon disulfide or hydrogen sulfide are produced, and the process can be used on conventional viscose -based fiber production equipment, and a relatively inexpensive diammonium hydrogen phosphate is used as an impregnating agent in the carbonization process.

According to the introduction, the experimental results show that the carbonization yield is improved by 133% compared with the sample without the impregnating agent, and the tensile strength reaches 0.72 GPa, which is excellent in similar biomass-based carbon fibers.