To find out if flax fiber can be an alternative to plastic or fiberglass, dResearchers have evaluated its behavior over time by analyzing the canvas of paintings from the Italian Baroque, but also Egyptian mortuary textiles.
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Flax fiber is of great interest to manufacturers because it is more ecological than plastic. How does this fiber age over time? There are two possibilities to find out how a material resists the passage of time: either it must be artificially aged in the laboratory, by playing on temperature, humidity, and some mechanical manipulations, or it is necessary to analyze objects that are several centuries old. This is why a Franco-Italian team (involving the CNRS and INRAE, the Research Institute for Agriculture and the Environment), went to take a few square centimeters of flax fibers from tables of Italian painting dating from the 17th and 18th centuries – they collected the sample from the back of the painting so it wouldn’t show – and analyzed it with state-of-the-art microscopes and infrared spectroscopy. They had already done the same thing a few months ago, analyzing Egyptian mortuary textiles that are 4000 years old. Result: the images show at the nanometric scale that flax fibers are very resistant to the passage of time.
To the great surprise of researchers, Egyptian flax fibers are even better preserved than that of Italian paintings (which have undergone the chemical action of paint and sometimes unfortunate restorations). But in both cases, the flax fibers, of course, stiffen a little, but keep their strength, which validates their use to make more environmentally friendly materials in industry. Including in particular to replace fiberglass in parts for the automobile or aeronautics.
We could rediscover other old plant fibers and bring them up to date. After flax, researchers would like to study the aging of hemp fibers, which also have a bright future in terms of eco-design. Hemp has the advantage of growing easily at home without consuming too much water, explains Johnny Beaugrand, biochemist at Inrae, one of the authors of the study. To learn more about their aging, the idea would now be to look at old ships to study samples from the past. Hemp has been used for centuries for ropes and sails.