With a novel advanced cold alkali-based method to dissolve cellulose as the foundation to produce sustainable textile fibres, the NeoCel project has addressed issues of the individual process stages to eventually cover the whole value-chain from pulp to garment. The major parts of the experimental development have been on cellulose activation and characterization, cellulose dissolution and fibre regeneration as these parts are essential to overcome the current limitations of the cold alkali processes for production of high-quality textile fibres. To reduce the environmental impact and cost of the process, another vital part of the project has been devoted to the system integration with a pulp mill, leading to increased energy efficiency and recovery/regeneration of the process chemicals used for the dissolution and regeneration. By the pulp mill integration of the process, new revenue streams for the mills are presented in addition to the synergistic advantages. To benchmark the developed process against existing manmade regenerated cellulose textile fibre production processes, mainly the viscose process – process simulations and design calculations, as well as life cycle assessment (LCA) have been performed both for the NeoCel process and for a viscose process with the same scenario and constraints (pulp mill integration, located in Sweden etc.).
The major achievements and outcome of the project are:
• Several new pulp adaptation methods to improve the solubility of cellulose in cold alkali, i.e. enhancing the reactivity towards direct dissolution, both via mechano-enzymatic and cooking/bleaching methods. With the new methods, a wide variety of sequences are available that allow finetuning the desired properties for each specific case (either different pulps or dissolution conditions). The results will be useful for a broad range of stakeholders within the pulping and regenerated cellulose fibre industries. A selection of the results has been published in a peer reviewed paper.
• Two innovative methods for regeneration of process chemicals for each of the two spin bath concepts of the project has gained large interest not only for use in the NeoCel process, but also for existing viscose plants and within the pulping industry. The results were presented at the Avancell conference and will be published in a peer reviewed scientific paper.
• The establishment of continuous mode operation, both for the pulp adaptation process and of the dissolution step. The newly developed dissolution technology not only allows dissolution in continuous mode for large-scale production, but also enables dissolution at more moderate temperatures, which lowers the energy consumption of the production. The results will be published in a peer reviewed scientific paper.
• Development of a new toolbox for more holistic analyses of filaments/fibres. The toolbox gives a new opportunity for better understanding the correlations between the process parameters and the fibre properties on a molecular level.
• The whole value-chain from pulp to garment has been demonstrated and evaluated. By the development of large-scale continuous processes for the mechano-enzymatic pulp pre-treatment and cold alkali cellulose dissolution, kilogram scale production of staple fibres was enabled. The fibres were then utilized for yarn spinning, fabric manufacture, design and production of prototype garments. The importance of this achievement is not limited to enabling prototype production, but also generated valuable data for the process simulations and LCA.
