DEVELOPMENT OF FEATHER NONWOVEN MATERIALS BY A DRY LAID NEEDLE PUNCHING PROCESS

Annually the world produces about 4 billion tons of waste just from chicken feathers which in most cases are incinerated in landfills resulting in pollution of atmosphere and land. For these reasons, it is crucial to find new ideas of applications of the byproduct of feathers and downs as a fiber. The production of nonwovens is a process where the web is formed by fibers mechanical entanglement with the help of hundreds of needles with barbs that transform the fibers from horizontal and vertical positions. Therefore, this paper is focused on the manufacturing of nonwovens out of feathers with the help of the dry laid needle punched process and the physical, mechanical and thermal properties analysis of the produced materials. Thanks to these experiments, we noticed that feather nonwovens possess presents good thermal properties. This study proved that is possible to avoid unnecessary poultry industry waste discarded in the landfills or disposals using nonwoven manufacturing.