Pretreatment Of The Natural Luffa Fiber And Its Regenerated Cellulose Membrane Properties

Cellulose is the most abundant renewable resources in the nature. These inexpensive, natural biodegradable cellulose resources should be used into ideal pulp or fiber raw materials. The environmentally friendly products and technologies will become the inevitable trend of sustainable development. Luffa is the vascular bundle of the loofah gourd and belongs to the gourd family, with a unique porousness physical structure and excellent mechanical strength. It is mainly composed of cellulose, hemicelluloses and lignin. Cellulose content is up to60%. However, this type of material abundance and inexpensive cellulosic materials have not been fully utilized and used. If it can be high used value, this can creat substantial economic benefits and ease the worsening environmental crisis with far-reaching social significance.Luffa fibers are pretreated by plasma firstly, and then worked the treated luffa fibers into regenerated cellulose film with using the NMMO process. Studies are as follows:1. Luffa fibers are treated with alkali, hydrogen peroxide, hemicellulase and plasma technology respectively, and used of orthogonal experiment to study the optimum conditions. Compared with alkaline treatment and enzyme treatment, the plasma process is simple and green. And its cost is small. It is better to remove lignin and hemicelluloses. The luffa fibers samples cellulose content is highest, reaching74.89%. Plasma treatment the optimum conditions for the power110W, the electrode distance of8mm and the processing time of10s.2. Luffa fibers plasma treated of methylene blue dye adsorption capscity increased significantly. The experiments results showed that, compared with untreated luffa fibers of13mg/g MB adsorption capacity, the maximal MB adsorption was as high as53mg/g obtained at the optimal plasma discharge conditions of110W power,10s time and8mm electrode distance.3. The treated luffa fibers worked into regenerated cellulose film with using the NMMO process, and cellulose membrane performance were investigated.The results showed that the luffa cellulose membrane of the cortex is very dense, crystalline variant type of cellulose II and the luffa cellulose film has good thermal stability, thermal decomposition temperature>400℃, in line with application tequirements.