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NEWS

The polyethylene used in plastic bags could be turned into something much more valuable through a new process being developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, United States.

Amit Naskar team, Division of Science and Technology of Materials in the laboratory, has developed a method, not only to produce carbon fiber, also, to provide better characteristics of the final product in a more sophisticated way, according to the applications you want to give to our product.

The results obtained so far suggest, in the near future, several sectors in the industry will have a flexible technique to produce technological innovative fibers in countless configurations.

Naskar and colleagues have shown that fibers can be made based on polyethylene with the required surface and manipulating the filament diameter to submicron scale.

The process also allows to tune the porosity, making the material potentially useful for filtering functions, catalysis and electrochemical energy utilization.