The global demand for wood as a building material is steadily growing, while the availability of this natural resource is diminishing. This situation has led to the development of alternative materials. Of the various synthetic materials that have been explored and advocated, polymer composites claim a major participation as building materials. There has been a growing interest in utilizing nat...

Several studies have reported various defluoridation capabilities of plant biomasses. The resultant variations in fluoride removal capacities are associated with the presence of different types of active functional groups in the respective biomasses. This study reports of the fluoride removal efficiencies of sisal leaf biomass in comparison. Comparison with other plant biomasses were made and h...

Textile biocomposites were prepared by reinforcing natural rubber with woven sisal fabric. Sisal fabric was subjected to various chemical modifications like mercerization, sitanation and heat treatment and its influence on the mechanical properties was analyzed. Tensile strength was seen to decrease with all chemical modifications except for composites prepared with heat-treated sisal fabric. E...

This paper describes an investigation of the influences of chlorine dioxide treatment on fibre surface lignin. The fibre surface characteristics and the interfacial behaviour of the sisal fibre/phenolic resin composites were also studied by SEM, AFM, and XPS. The results show that the surface of the untreated fibre contains a large amount of lignin with granular structure and non-granular struc...

The main aim of this work was to study the effect of sisal fiber surface treatments on water uptake behavior of composites based on untreated and treated fibers. For this purpose, sisal fibers were treated with different chemical treatments. All surface treatments delayed the water absorption of fibers only for a short time of period. No significant differences were observed in water uptake pro...

A rod-shaped bacterium was isolated from the soil in a karst area of Guilin, China and its biotransformation of steroidal saponins in sisal (Agave sisalana Perrine) to tigogenin was presented for the first time. A total of 22 strains for the degradation of steroidal saponins in sisal were isolated from 48 soil samples, and the isolated rod-shaped, bacterial strain ZG-21 was used for the product...

Single-assignment languages offer the potential to efficiently program parallel processors. This paper discusses issues that arise in mapping SISAL programs onto the Warp TM array, a linear systolic array in use at Carnegie Mellon. A Warp machine with ten cells can deliver up to 100 million floating point operations per second. The paper begins with a discussion of systolic arrays as targets fo...

Short randomly oriented banana and sisal hybrid fibre reinforced polyester composites, banana/polyester composites and sisal/polyester composites were fabricated at different fibre loading say, 0.20 to 0.50 Vf. Composites were prepared by varying the relative volume fraction of the two fibres at each fibre loading. When the fibre loading was increased; tensile, flexural and impact properties in...

Studies of ventilatory capacity change in small groups of employees during a shift in a cotton mill and in three cotton ginneries in Uganda, a sisal factory in Kenya, and a jute mill in England, have demonstrated that an effect is produced by the dust in the cotton mill and in a very dusty ginnery but not in two other less dusty ginneries. No significant effect was detected in the sisal factory...

Mercerisation is a common chemical treatment for sisal fibres since it can be used to increase their interfacial adhesion to various polymeric matrices. The influence of this treatment on fibre tensile strength from the point of view of a Weibull distribution is reported. A hundred non-treated sisal fibres were individually tested and the accordance of their tensile strength to a Weibull distri...