TREC

The wider development of flax fibres for garment or technical textiles requiring load bearing capacity suffers from the high price of the textile flax fibres which are in a continuously increasing demand by the global garment textile industry. With such high prices, it is therefore difficult for high volume markets such as automotive to include flax fibre in their products. These considerations are particularly relevant in a context of climate change, with a steady decrease in textile flax fibre yields. They instead look at cheaper alternative resources which can possess similar or even higher mechanical potential than textile flax fibres. This is the challenging objective of the TREC project. To reach this target, oilseed flax fibres usually considered as wastes or low added value by-products or low added value applications (burnt for generation of heat, isolation fibres, paper) are targeted in the TREC project. Winter oil-seed flax cultivars will be grown with a dual scale objective (seeds and fibres) to maximise both yields. The TREC project will also focus on the enhancement of the oil-seed flax fibre tensile properties by investigating the conditions at which the structural defects (kink-bands), present in any flax or oil-seed flax fibre after their extraction, can be reduced in size and their effect attenuated. A multiscale approach, from the individual fibre up to textile preparation processes at a production scale, will be considered to increase the understanding of kink-band defect generation as well as the possibility to reduce their size and their deleterious effect. By enhancing the tensile property of these fibres, this will open up new applications and markets for industrial manufacturers using load bearing natural fibres for their products. A new value chain is expected to emerge from this project in a sector in high expectation of high mechanical properties natural fibres.