Lynne Wong's PhD thesis

Figure 3.6. Jeffco wet disintegrator.
This last method using a wet disintegrator looked very promising as confirmed by
Mangion and Player (1991); however, it would be best if the use of the cane chipper as
well as any chemicals could be avoided. Since it was desired to extract fibres from various
components of cane, it was necessary to experiment on cane samples so as to find the
optimum conditions for fibre extraction from each of the cane components without
inflicting too much injury to their fibres.
With the objective of separating fibres from pith, a basket identical to that described by
Moodley (1991) was built into a commercially available water bath with an outlet orifice at
the inclined base to facilitate drainage of the water from the bath (Fig 3.7).
Experimentation showed that the separation of fibre from pith by using this method was
poor and time-consuming, as recycling of the pith into the fibre occurred when the sample
basket rotated in a trough of water, where the pith was in suspension. Considering the
number and the size of samples requiring the treatment, a different method had to be
found.
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