Investigation On The Regenerated Bamboo Filaments For Cigarette Filters

Now almost 95% cigarettes in the world are using CA as filters, it is so important to develop new and applied cigarette filter materials as people pay more attention to health and under a big background of fighting cigarettes. In cellulose fibers, viscose and acetate are the most widely used, especially the new invented regenerated bamboo fibers.As the regenerated cellulose fibers, viscose and acetate have many likeness in structure and properties, viscose fibers has remarkable price advantage compared to acetate fibers, so if we use bamboo fibers as materials, we will cut down the price of cigarettes. This paper analyses the properties of bamboo fibers and viscose fibers: indicates the structures of two fibers by SEM,FTIR and WAXD, investigates their flexibility and frictional property, explain the similarities and differences of the two fibers by comparing them. The result of FTIR indicates that the liberation of apices contacting with acetyl are stronger; the WAXD results explains that the crystallization of bamboo fibers is higher than acetate's, so it has higher modulus and intensity.Using bamboo filaments replace acetate filaments partially, adopting "physical compensation" method, and then we can produce cigarette filter tows of bamboo and acetate filaments, in the end we test and analyze the routine properties including moisture,weight,size and PD of the normal filter tows and experimental filter tows, we find the moisture and weight is increasing, but the PD is reducing and there is no remarkable change about the size. Smoking the cigarettes and testing the content of harmful components: nicotine,tar and carbon monoxide, the result indicates that there is no differences about the testing data between two samples, it means that the bamboo fibers does not influence the filtrated effect. Assessing the filtrating effect of filter tows recur to SEM pictures.At the end of this paper, we test and analyze the degradation properties of bamboo and acetate fibers amply. Comparing the degradation of two fibers under acid and sodium hydroxide conditions we can see that the weight loss of acetate fibers is bigger than bamboo in any conditions. Biologic degradation experiments indicate that the bamboo fibers has good biologic degradation property, it is a kind of green environmental fibers. The differences of molecular structure result in diversities of degradation process. Stress-strain pictures show the mechanical performance and external shape changes of two fibers before and after degradation.