JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #92 - October/November 2014 - 9

biocomposites

FibreCITY: building a renewable
future with biocomposites

By
Simon Potter B.Sc. (Hons), Ph.D.
Chief Science Officer
FibreCITY

T

he Prairie Agriculture Fibre
Characterization Industrial
Technology Capability initiative (FibreCITY), established by the
Composites Innovation Centre in
Manitoba, is the solution to understanding the properties and potential
of resources such as flax and hemp,
making the use of natural fibres in
any manufacturing industry a reality. Beginning with the breeding of
crop varieties that are optimized for
fibre content and quality, FibreCITY
is enhancing a vertically integrated
biofibre enterprise. Using FibreCITY,
the Composites Innovation Centre is
enabling North America to be on the
leading edge of biocomposite technologies, ahead of the global curve in
natural fibre utilization.

As the demand for companies to use renewable, green materials to reduce their environmental footprint is growing
rapidly, a robust global biocomposites industry is needed to
satisfy that demand. To enable this thriving biocomposites
industry, we have to understand our resources to be able to
control and guarantee the quality and consistency of materials to industry.

FibreCITY is able to engineer highvalue industrial seed and fibre crops
that can substitute for petroleum
products in a variety of biomaterial
applications.
The core of FibreCITY is a sustainable high-throughput phenotyping capability with the capacity to evaluate
biofibres from multiple agricultural
and natural sources. This capability,
housed in the Composites Innovation
Centre's Winnipeg, Manitoba, facility
and managed with GenomePrairie,
is working closely with the breeders,
producers, harvesters and processors
to achieve the highest-quality material
for high-value biomaterial applications. FibreCITY is partnering with

the University of Manitoba, Red River
College and the Industrial Technology
Centre (ITC) to become a self-sustaining entity with emphasis placed
on massive data-sharing capabilities
and supercomputing capacity.
Although numerous instruments
are currently used for fibre grading
and characterization, they are noncomprehensive, non-integrated and
are still far from achieving their full
potential. To be successful, it is vital
to develop a strong, integrated and
holistic characterization system for
natural fibre properties and modelling, predicting and optimizing their
effects downstream in industrial
processes.

A self-sustaining entity
FibreCITY is a specialized suite of
equipment that makes it possible
to assess the physical and chemical
properties of various natural fibres
and how the growing conditions and
processing techniques affect those
properties. With this knowledge,

The FibreCITY Lab

No92 October - November 2014 /

jec composites magazine 9
JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #92 - October/November 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #92 - October/November 2014
