Natural fibres from banana plant waste

The EC-funded BADANA project aims to develop procedures for the extraction of natural fibre from banana plant waste. The fibres will be used to develop thermoplastic composite products for the automotive industry.

The Badana project, led by consultancy Smithers Rapra, is half way through its two-year funding period and the first prototype of the multi-phase decorticating machine (MPDM) which automates the process of extracting fibre from the leaves of the banana plant has been developed.

Work has also been undertaken to analyse the fibres of a variety of banana species grown in the Canary Islands. This has helped in the development of formulations for modifying the fibre surface in order to ensure good adhesion between the fibres and the polymer with which they are compounded.

Successful candidate formulations have been selected and lab scale trials, involving injection moulding and rotational moulding of the developed plastic composites, have been carried out. The results have shown good behaviour of the fibre compared to other natural fibres in terms of mechanical properties and coupling to the plastic matrix, as well as resistance to degradation under processing conditions.

In the next few months the BADANA project will focus on completing the lab scale trials of the MPDM and optimising the machine design. Work will be undertaken to manufacture the composites on an industrial scale to enable industrial trials to take place. Parts such as components for car doors, washing machines and kayaks are expected to be tested at this stage of the project.

The Badana project will run until June 2011. The project partners are: BSH Electrodomésticos (Spain), Colorex Master Batches (Netherlands), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spain), Grupo Antolín Ingeniería (Spain), Grupo Regional de Cooperativas Plataneras del Archipielago Canario (COPLACA) (Spain), PEVA (Hungary), Queen’s University Belfast (UK), Rototek (UK), Sivel (Bulgaria), Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain), and Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain).