Study On The Preparation And Properties Of The Plant Fiber Foaming Cushion Material

Since factors of nature recourse and environment pollution, when designing package,protection reliability, structure rationality, cost, and some other factors should be considered. In addition, environment friendly of packaging material should also be regarded. In recent years, cushion packaging material making from foaming plant fiber has been focused among scholars. The new material has the characteristics of low cost, environmental friendly and so on. However, the cushioning performance need to be further improved compared with traditional cushion packaging.Based on the results studied by our group, this paper takes wasted corrugated paperboard and corn straw powder as main raw materials, which are made mixing plant fiber by soaked and pulped. Then, stir after adding adhesive, plasticizer and foaming agent and some other additives. And then, the above mixture is placed in a specific mold, through heated and foamed by microwave, after that, environmental plant fiber foaming cushioning material can be got. Then cushioning properties and microstructure of the material are analyzed deeply. Specifically, the contents of this paper are as follow.(1)Preparation of the new material. Based on the relevant research results of our group and the foaming buffer material in both domestic and abroad, the raw materials should be selected correctly and made the related pretreatment. Using single factor experimental method, and taking properties of apparent effect, static compression and resilience of the material as evaluation index, the aim is to determine the appropriate level of raw materials of preparation required and four primary factors that influence properties are found out.(2)Optimization of process parameters. Taking the main four factors which affect material properties as main premise based on single-factor experiment, four factors and three levels orthogonal test is designed. And then taking expansion ratio, density, deformation energy, resilient rate, minimum buffer coefficient and acceleration response as the evaluation indices, the range analysis of each index can be obtained and the variance analysis of orthogonal test is acquired with the help of SPSS software. Combined the results of the range analysis with variance analysis, the optimum preparation condition of the foaming material can be obtained.(3)Study on the vibration isolation performance of the material. Taking the material by orthogonal test as the research object, the sinusoidal vibration test at constant frequency is taken. In the end, the result shows that, the maximum response acceleration is less than the acceleration in a certain frequency range. Therefore, the material has the function of vibration isolation.(4)Microstructure analysis of plant fiber foaming buffer material. Morphology is observed by microscope, and it shows that chambers are formed with the aid of hydrogen bonding and adhesive based on many sizes of the fiber, which can also characterize formation mechanism of cushioning materials. Through scanning electronmicroscope(SEM), influence factors of the microstructure can be studied. Thermal properties of materials are determined through TGA, and the rate of residual materials is 26.53%. Therefore, it has good performance of thermal stability. The molecular structure of the material is also determined by using FTIR.(5)Degradation properties of the material. Based on the one of main purposes of this paper, degradation properties should be discussed. To reflect environment protection properties, varies of materials are placed in three different positions to do the degradation experiment. The results show that the samples in 3 different natural environments are all degradable in different degree, and the environmental friendly of the material is verified.In summary, the plant fiber foaming buffer material produced has good cushioning properties, thermal stability and environmental protection and so on. And it can be used as the buffer material in transport packaging, and also, it can provide the way and reference for the new type of plant fiber foaming buffer material developing.