What is bio-based chemical fiber?
Bio-based fibers or bio-based fibers refer to fibers made from renewable organisms or biological extracts. Fibers produced from non-renewable petrochemical resources such as coal and petroleum.
There are many varieties of bio-based fibers. For the convenience of research and use, they can be classified from different angles:
1) From the biological properties, it can be divided into animal fiber, plant fiber and microbial fiber;
2) From the industrial classification, it can be divided into agricultural by-product fiber and marine by-product fiber;
3) According to the production process, bio-based fibers can be divided into three categories:
▲Bio-based virgin fibers, animal and plant fibers that are directly used after being processed by physical methods;
▲Bio-based regenerated fibers, that is, fibers made from natural animals and plants as raw materials, through physical or chemical methods to make spinning solutions, and then through appropriate spinning processes;
▲Bio-based synthetic fibers are made of high-purity monomers by chemical methods using biomass as raw materials, and then polymerized to obtain high-molecular-weight polymers, which are then processed into fibers by appropriate spinning processes.
Bio-based regenerated fibers and bio-based synthetic fibers are collectively referred to as bio-based chemical fibers. So how do these two types of fibers differ? Bio-based regenerated fibers do not change the original chemical structure of biomass macromolecules, and the spinning process is a reconstruction of its physical form, which only changes the aggregated structure. The chemical and physical properties of bio-based synthetic fibers depend on the monomers used, regardless of the source of the monomers. In other words, synthetic fibers can use either bio-based monomers or petroleum-based monomers, and the properties of fibers made from the same monomers will be the same. Bio-based synthetic fibers emphasize that their monomers are derived from living organisms.
