WO2000058061A1

WO2000058061A1 - A method for producing sheet or board of coconut fibres

Info

Publication number: WO2000058061A1
Application number: PCT/ID1999/000003
Authority: WO
Inventors: Handay Sendayung
Original assignee: Handay Sendayung
Priority date: 1999-03-31
Filing date: 1999-12-22
Publication date: 2000-10-05
Also published as: AU3071200A; ID25423A

Abstract

A method for making a sheet or board that made from fibers of coconut, the method consists of steps as follows: to provide fibers of coconut's outer peel; to dry the wet fibers until reaches 6 - 14 % of water content; to clean the dry fibers from dust and dirt; to solidify and flatten the dry fibers continuously by using punching machine which has more than 600 needles to make it into soft sheet of fibers; to adhere the soft sheet with a resin type adhesive; to make the sheet half dry; to cut the sheet into a desirable size; to heat press the soft sheet that have been adhered but not dry yet in a certain thickness in 10 - 25 kg/cm2 of pressure for 3 - 15 minutes and in between 100 - 180 °C; and to form board or sheet by cutting the hot pressed sheet into a predetermined desirable size.

Description

A METHOD FOR PRODUCING SHEET OR BOARD OF COCONUT FIBRES

The Technical Field

The present invention relates to a method for producing a sheet or board that made from coconut fibers.

The Backuround Art

In general the need on furniture and other building materials are not irrespective of the use of wood as a raw material- Wood as a raw material is directly taken from an industrial or natural forest, the stock of wood that is fulfill the need in a long term become so limited, still as a main focus of the life preservation. The slow growing of the industrial plants, or forest does not balance with excessive and immediate demand of wood- If there is no solution for solving the problem that really always depend on wood, there will be a problem on the existence of raw building materials, especially for dependence on wood as a raw material.

One of the approaches in solving the problem related to the usage of wood is by changing the utilizing of wood in form of boards or sheets that are made from fibers of outer peel of coconut which is abundant and easy to gain into a board and sheet.

Furthermore, the need of natural wood can be substituted by board or sheet that are made from coconut fibers and that will not damage environment, and have lower cost of production but with the same strength and quality as board of natural wood-

The realization of the invention is to produce in huge numbers of product, then give a great contribution to the life preservation and in the field of building material-

Disclosure of Invention

As a main objectiveness of the present invention is to provide a building material as the wood substitution by producing a sheet or board that made from coconut fibers, which is produced by the steps as follow: to provide fibers of coconut outer peel; to dry the wet fibers by using the mechanic dryer which blows hot steam from bifueled mechanic dryer to the stack of coconut fibers in a temperature of 80 - 100 °C; to clean the coconut fibers from dirt and dust; to solidify and to flatten the dried fibers by using a punching machine continuously; to glue the solid and flat fibers by using a resin type adhesive, preferably urea formaldehyde resin or melamine formaldehyde resin; to make a half dry in an average temperature of 60 - 80 °C for relatively short time, for example 2 minutes; to cut the drying result into the desirable size; to hot press the fibers which have been already glued but not dry yet in a pressure of 10 - 25 kg/cm2 for 3 -15 minutes long; to heat in a temperature of 100 - 180 °C; and to form a board or sheet of fiber by cutting it into a desirable size. Preferably in drying step, the wet fibers are dryed by blown out hot steam of between 80 - 100°C from a mechanical drying machine to the stack of fibers in a drying room until the water content of fibers reaches 6 - 14%.

After that, in cleaning step, the coconut fibers are cleaned by blown pressured air to the stack of fibers by a conventional blower until all fibers clean. Preferably fibers will be continuously solidified and flattened by a punching machine which has more than six hundreds punching needles to make fibers in soft, solid and flat sheet forms.

Preferably in an adhering step, the soft sheet form of fibers will be adhered by giving resin type adhesive, preferably urea or melamine formaldehyde resin with content of adhesive in 10 - 25% of the total weight of fibers.

Preferably in hot pressing step, a sheet of fibers will become hard sheet or board of fibers where it is possible to make sheet of fibers in more than one layer of sheets. If there are more than one layer of sheets, more than one soft sheets with wet adhesive on it will be pressed by heat pressing to make multilayer hard sheets of fibers in a desirable thickness. Preferably each finished product has about 2 - 30 mm of thickness.

Furthermore, in order to easy understand, details' explanation will be given as follows.

Brief Description of Drawings Figure 1 is a flow charts of the method for producing board or sheet of this invention; and

Figure 2 is a perspective view of sheet or board made by using the method of this invention-

Preferred Embodiments for Carrying Out The Invention

In present invention the term of a sheet or board is only differentiated by the size of total thickness. So the method for producing a sheet or board of coconut fibers will be explained below is basically same. Now it will be explained in details the steps for producing a board or sheet of the present invention-

Referring to figure 1, the first step of the method of this present invention is preparing fibers (A) of coconut outer peel conventionally, for example, by milling or pounding frequently and then fiberizing to obtain more fibers, especially the inner peel which contains more fibers.

The age of coconut fruit that contains fibers is various. However, the most important thing is that it has already formed relatively hard shell. By doing so, to obtain some coconut fibers, we should keep paying attention to the advantage of the coconut itself, it means that we still have to make sure that the taken coconut is a mature one.

Then, to obtain fibers from coconut we can use the conventional method as mentioned above, or by using the modern one that is by a destroying machine to fibrerized the coconut 's peel which has been milled or pounded. The length of obtained fibers is among 2 - 30 cm and the thickness is about 0.2 - 3 mm. The next step is drying (B) the still wet fiber by oil fueled mechanical machine.

Hot steam with temperature among 80 - 100°C generated from this machine to be blown to fibers stack till the water content of 6 - 14%. This process of drying work will be done in a drying room or vessel continuously.

The height and width of the stack is adjusted by the capacity of the available tool or machine.

The further step is cleaning fibers (C) of coconut from dirt and dust. It can be done by blowing the pressured air from a blower directed to the fibers stack in a specific container, so the fibers will not be scattered but dust and dirt will be blown away.

The following step is solidifying and flattening continuously (D) the fibers that have been cleaned and dried by the punching machine which has six hundreds needles, so the disorder fibers will become order and flat in soft sheet form.

The soft sheet continued to the adhering step (E) by using resin type adhesive, preferably urea or melamine formaldehyde resin. The content of adhesive to the total weight of fibers is in the range of 10 - 25 %. It can be done by many methods such as, dipping the plague of fibers into adhesive retaining vessel or by spraying thin adhesive to all sheet surfaces.

After adhering soft sheet, the step will be continued to make it half dry (F), for example, by temperature of 60 - 80 °C for about 2 minutes by a mechanic drying tool. Then continued by cutting (G) the sheet into a desirable size. Then heat pressing (H) of 100 - 180°C for 3 - 15 minutes with 10 - 25 kg/cm2 pressure. One layer of sheet that have been pressed will gain the finished product with 1 ,5 - 3 mm of thickness-

If preferably thickness is more than 2 mm, the soft sheet which had been dried yet will be piled in layers and then pressed by heat pressing together, so it can be form a hard sheet or board by using the same method as well.

Then, cutting (I) the edge side to make it proper and make it into a desirable size.

From the above steps that have been mentioned, this invention provide a board or sheet of coconut , resin type adhesive for gluing the fibers into sheet and and into layers of sheets. The board or sheet obtained is a hard board or sheet that can be used as a building material such as wall, plafond, partition wall, heat isolator, sound isolator, for producing boxes, containers and other coating materials-

After the procedure of this invention is explained above, to understand its scope, here is enclosed the claims of invention.

Claims

1. A method for producing a sheet or board of fibers that made from coconut fibers consist of steps as follows: providing fibers of coconut outer peels; drying the wet fibers until it reaches 6 - 14 % of water content; cleaning the dry fibers from dust and dirt; solidifying and flattening the dry fibers continuously by using punching machine which has more than 600 needles to make it into soft sheet of fibers, adhering the soft sheet with a resin type adhesive; drying the soft sheet to become half dry; cut the half dry soft sheet in a desirable size; heat pressing a number of soft sheet which are piled up many layers in a certain thickness which have been adhered but not dry yet on 10 - 25 kg/cm2 of pressure for 3-15 minutes and in between 100 - 180°C; and forming board or sheet by cutting the plague resulted by hot pressed into a predetermined desirable size.

2. A method for producing a sheet or board that made from fibers of coconut as claimed in claim 1, wherein drying the fiber is by blowing hot steam from oil fueled mechanic dryer in between 80 - 100 °C of hot steam temperature-

3. A method for producing a sheet or board that made from fibers of coconut as claimed in claim 1, wherein the resin type adhesive is urea formaldehyde resin.

4. A method for producing a sheet or board that made from fibers of coconut as claimed in claim 1, wherein the resin type adhesive is melamine formaldehyde resin.

5. A method for producing a sheet or board that made from fibers of coconut as claimed in claim 1, 3, and 4, wherein the resin type adhesive is contains of 10 - 25% of total weight of glued sheet.