Plant Extraction and Physicochemical Characterizations of Untreated and Pretreated Diss Fibers (Ampelodesmos mauritanicus)

Abstract

The Ampelodesmos mauritanicus plant, Mauritanian grass or also called 'Diss', is a perennial abundant plant on the Mediterranean contour, having attractive characteristics for ecofriendly materials. This work aims to highlight the potential of the Diss fibers elements by assessing their use as reinforcement for polymer matrices (bio-composite). So, untreated and treated Diss fibers by chemical (soda, silane and acetic acid) and thermal treatment have been manually extracted and characterized to evaluate their surface condition as well as their chemical composition, their mechanical properties and their thermal stability. The obtained results have shown many advantages look promising for such an application, especially the fact that the Diss fiber bundles has small diameter (89 ± 22 μm), a rough surface with the presence of thorns, a low density of 0.93 g/cm3, and a tensile strength that can reach 270 MPa. Furthermore, all the treatments adopted have shown improvements regarding the fibrillation of fiber bundles (could reach −40% for the diameter), their surface state, their thermal stability and their mechanical behavior (could reach +60% for Young's modulus and +15% for tensile stress).

The Influence of Chemical and Thermal Treatments on the Diss Fiber Hygroscopic Behaviors

“…In order to analyze the effect of the treatment type on the hygrothermal behavior five kind of fibers have been studied: untreated technical Diss fibers (UTFD), treated with NaOH (NTFD), treated with silane (STFD), treated with acetic acid (ATFD) and thermally treated (TTFD). These fibers are the same used in a previous study (Nouri et al 2019), treatment methods were carried out as follows:…”

“…They are characteristic of the carboxyl functions of pectin, which should also be affected by the water absorption. This may be due to the low content of pectin in this fiber kind (Nouri et al 2019). The same constant has been raised for the peak at 1030 cm −1 which is characteristic of the fiber polysaccharide nature (Célino et al 2014).…”

“…Diss is one of the most abundant plant resources in the Mediterranean contour (Figure 1(a)). In this work, Diss plant leaves were harvested by hand in the north of Algeria at the end of their maturity (in 2018), then, they went through a manual extraction process according to the method described by (Nouri et al 2019). These fibers exhibited a low density of 0.93 g/cm 3 with a chemical composition consisting mainly of glucose (32,6%), xylan (24.9%), and lignin (20.6%).…”

“…They are frequently connected to a part of thorny epidermis, see Figure 1(b), where presented a tensile strength, a Young's modulus, and an ultimate strain of 273 ± 36 MPa, 11.4 ± 2.2 GPa, and 2.67% ± 0.6, respectively. These results are taken from a previous study (Nouri et al 2019).…”

“…Recently, this plant attracted the attention of researchers and particularly to be used as a reinforcement for cement composites (Merzoud and Habita 2008) (Achour, Ghomari, and Belayachi 2017), and polymer composites (Bourahli 2014) (Sarasini et al 2019). In terms of extraction methods, chemical composition, treatments, mechanical and thermal behavior, Diss fibers have been subject to several studies in the literature (Merzoud and Habita 2008) (Bourahli and Osmani 2013) (Achour, Ghomari, and Belayachi 2017) (Sarasini et al 2019) (Nouri et al 2019). However, their hygrothermal properties remain not fully explored by the authors.…”