Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Popmask (Poplar Fiber Based Sustainable and Antibacterial Face Mask Filtration Media)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2021-05-01 do 2023-04-30
(i) Creating wet laid webs from poplar fibers
(ii) Developing a surgical mask
(iii) Developing a filtering facepiece respirators that can effectively filter ultrafine particles.
Poplar trees are very fast-growing trees and are grown on 76 million decares of land in the world. Poplar trees are used as raw materials for industrial products such as paper, cellulose pulp, and plywood. Although poplar trees are widely used in the industrial field, the fibers of these trees have never been used for industrial purposes before.
Poplar fibers have hollow lumen and highly hydrophobic. In this study, wet-laid nonwovens with various weight densities were produced using poplar fibers. These webs were employed as filtration media in surgical mask.
Ultra-fine particle filtration efficiencies of the poplar webs were also investigated. EN 149 Test standard procedures were followed for this purpose. Automated Filter Tester T8130A instrument was employed to generate NaCl particles with a size of 0.3 µm and the air flow rate was 30l/min. However; webs showed low filtering efficiencies which makes them difficult to use in filtering facepiece respirators. Project results will be presented in two international conferences:
FILTECH 2024, Germany and Cellulose 2024, Germany.
During the project, an Erasmus student completed his internship at this project and gain new knowledge and skills.