Spinning fiber, asbestos

Spinning fiber - The eleanest and longest fibers, to >12mm, are reserved for producing woven asbestos textiles. 

Insulating products - Textiles for heat-resistant protective clothing are woven from spinning fiber, but most asbestos insulation products are in the form of paper, paperboard, millboard, and mat from paper-grade fiber. Asbestos provides flexibihty, dimensional stabihty, tear resistance, heat resistance, chemical resistance, moisture resistance, low thermal conductivity, and high electrical resistivity. Products include pipe wrap, thermal insulation in appliances, and electrical and heat insulation in electronics. 

Boric acid/alkaU spinning has been commercialized in Kuraray Co. and Unitika Co. in Japan, and is reportedly under research and development also in the People s RepubHc of China as a process for producing high strength PVA fiber to be used for replacing asbestos (9). 

The macroscopic individual fibers of chrysotile asbestos consist of more or less parallelly oriented fibrils, which have a diameter of 15 to 40 nm and according to electron microscopic investigations are composed of carpet roll-like hollow fibers. The wall partitions of these small rolls consist of double layers of the composition Mg3(OH)4Si205, in which one brucite Mg(OH)2- and one Si205- layer are condensed with one another. These crystal lattices not fitting precisely with one another leads to curvature and hence a hollow fiber. Chrysotile asbestos is, as a result, easily fragmented into very fine fibers, which are soft and flexible and hence, of all the asbestos types, they lend themselves most easily to spinning. Industrially, however, chrysotile is always present as fiber bundles. 

Air-jet spinning 116 Amorphous regions 54 Animal fibers 43 Appret 271 Asbestos 49 Atlas (Satin) weave 151... 

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