Pengembangan Vascular Bundle Limbah Batang Sawit dengan Pencampuran Serat Kapas (Gossypium sp.) sebagai Bahan Baku Pembuatan Benang Komersial

Abstract

Oil palm replanting produces of around 81,5 million m3 palm trunk waste (LBS), so further utilisation is needed so that this palm trunk waste can be used commercially. One of the efforts that can be made to utilise LBS is to make use of the vascular bundle into commercial yarn. Besides the increasing demand for textiles in Indonesia every year due to economic growth and population increase. So the use of fibre from oil palm trunks is an alternative as raw material in the textile industry. This study aims to utilise vascular bundle from palm trunk waste as raw material for yarn manufacture and analyse the effect of mixing palm vascular bundle staple fibre with a percentage of cotton fibre on yarn quality. The method of making yarn is carried out by chemical pulping process, namely cooking the vascular bundle raw material in a digister machine using 20% (w/v) NaOH solvent. The pulping results were treated with bleaching and no bleaching, as well as blending treatments with cotton fibre percentages of 20%, 35%, and 50% (w/w), then the fibres were twisted by crossing until they were long enough to form yarn. The results showed that blending vascular bundles of oil palm trunk and cotton fibre can be used as raw material for yarn making. From the aspect of fibre dimension measurement, vascular bundle and cotton fibre belong to the quality class III and II, respectively. The mechanical properties of fineness resulted in yarn fineness numbers ranging from 5.41 - 7.49 tex. Yarn tensile strength has values ranging from 115.59 - 163.36 MPa. Yarn creep test has values ranging from 14.83 - 21.31%. Based on the analysis of variance, no bleaching treatment with 35% (w/w) cotton percentage is the best treatment and feasible in accordance with textile industry standards.