Wettability of the fine fibre sheet prepared from oil palm empty fruit bunches

Abstract

Empty Fruit Bunches (EFB) are byproducts in the palm oil industry. Recently, many studies focused on the application of EFB to pulp fibre and paper. In this study, we used a nanoengineered mechanical treatment, aqueous counter collision (ACC), to investigate the miniaturisation behavior of chemical EFB pulp fibre and compared it with chemical hardwood pulp fibre. Furthermore, a sheet was prepared from fine EFB fibre produced by ACC to examine the wettability. The miniaturisation of the EFB pulp fibre using ACC progressed more quickly than that of hardwood pulp fibre, and finally, nanofibre was obtained from the EFB. The width of nanofibre was the same as hardwood chemical pulp fibre. A drop of water didn’t penetrate into the sheet but spread on the sheet surface within 10 s. The water contact angle of the fine EFB fibre sheet depended strongly on the number of collision in ACC treatment than that of the fine hardwood fibre sheet.