SISAL FIBERS

The relatively greatest proportion of collage waste is from leather making. Collage hydrolyse (CH) derived from leather processing is a kind of hydrolyzed product. The tree top collage strands are partially or completely separated into globular domains. Containing a different secondary structure to the normal collage random coils, due to the poor mechanical propertise. The mechanical properties can be improved by adding chemical reagest to make linkages between moleculas and intermolecular. Another way to improve the mecahnical properties is the introduction of fiber-like materials to obtain a new composite. The fiber-protein composites whit functionality have broad aplications. There are many researches on fiber-like materials reinforced composites. Natural fibers such as fiber of cotton, ramie, jute, flax, sisal, and wood can be a renewable and cheaper subtitue for sintetic fiber, and have numerous advantages, such as low cost, low density, high toughness, accepteble specific strength properties, ease of separation, and biodegradability.
The paper presented an investigation on the preparation and properties of an environmentally friendly bio-composites based on collage hydrolyzed (CH) and sisal fibers (SF). CH was cross-linked by glutaraldehyde (GTA) and plastisized by glycerol to improve the mechanical performance. The influences of GTA content, CH concentration, and glycerol content on the swelling ratio of the modified collage were investigated. The influence of sisal fiber treatment, fiber content and fiber length on the mechanical properties of the bio-composites was discussed.