Fu Yu, Gu Hongmei, Wu H Felix, Shi Sheldon Q
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of North Texas Discovery Park, 3940 N Elm St., Denton, TX 76207, USA.
USDA Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, One Gifford Pinchot Drive, Madison, WI 53726, USA.
Materials (Basel). 2024 Aug 22;17(16):4164. doi: 10.3390/ma17164164.
The processes of hemp bast fiber retting, forming, and drying offer the opportunity for value-added products such as natural fiber-reinforced composites. A new process for the retting of raw bast fibers through enzyme-triggered self-cultured bacterial retting was developed in the lab-scale setup. This study focused on comparing the energy consumption and environmental impacts of this bacterial retting process with the thermochemical retting process currently widely used to obtain lignocellulosic fibers for composites. The gate-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) models of the two retting processes were constructed to run a comparison analysis using the TRACI (the tool for the reduction and assessment of chemical and other environmental impacts) method for environmental impacts and the cumulative energy demand (CED) method for energy consumptions. This work has demonstrated the advantages of the bacterial retting method from an environmental standpoint. The result of our research shows about a 24% gate-to-gate reduction in CED for bacterial retting and 20-25% lower environmental impacts relating to global warming, smog formation, acidification, carcinogenics, non-carcinogenics, respiratory effects, ecotoxicity, and fossil fuel depletion when compared to that of thermochemical retting.
大麻韧皮纤维脱胶、成型和干燥的过程为生产天然纤维增强复合材料等增值产品提供了机会。在实验室规模的装置中开发了一种通过酶触发的自培养细菌脱胶来处理生韧皮纤维的新工艺。本研究的重点是将这种细菌脱胶工艺与目前广泛用于获取复合材料木质纤维素纤维的热化学脱胶工艺的能源消耗和环境影响进行比较。构建了两种脱胶工艺的从原料到成品的生命周期评估（LCA）模型，以使用TRACI（化学和其他环境影响减少与评估工具）方法进行环境影响比较分析，并使用累积能源需求（CED）方法进行能源消耗比较分析。这项工作从环境角度证明了细菌脱胶方法的优势。我们的研究结果表明，与热化学脱胶相比，细菌脱胶的从原料到成品的累积能源需求降低了约24%，在全球变暖、烟雾形成、酸化、致癌物质、非致癌物质、呼吸影响、生态毒性和化石燃料枯竭等方面的环境影响降低了20-25%。
