BigPatents India

Technical fibres can be extracted from pseudostem sheaths of banana. These are vascular bundles of schleroids and fibres embedded in parenchyma and collenchyma tissue. Removal of the tissue material by the semi-automatic machine Raspador gives technical fibres from the pseudostem. These fibres look dull and grayish in colour as compared to the hand extracted fibres by scraping the pseudostem sheath with blunt metal edge. With passage of time the fibres become dark brownish. Banana pseudostem fibre cleaner device has been developed at the Central Institute for Research on Cotton Technology, Matunga, Mumbai, which can clean these Raspador extracted fibres. The non fibrous liquid which gives dull grayish look to the fibres is uniformly squeezed out by this machine giving lustrous silvery white good quality fibres. These are as good as or better than the hand extracted fibres, which are supposed to be the norms for comparing with other types of extracted fibres. Drawing: 3 Sheets. Total Pages: 12 Fig. 2