Design of Competitive Processing Plants for Hemp Fibre Production

Despite an annually growing demand for natural fibres accompanied by worldwide increasing fibre prices as well as long tradition and experience in fibre processing, the production facilities for hemp and flax fibres are very limited in Europe. At present, the lack of modern harvesting and economic processing technologies seem to be the greatest obstacles for hemp fibre producers under the changing conditions of international raw material markets. Therefore, detailed investigations of all process stages of hemp fibre processing have been carried out at the Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering (ATB). A novel hemp processing line has been developed, installed, and tested at industrial scale in the last 3 years. Investigations regarding optimum plant layout have shown that a straw throughput of approximately 4 t h−1 is required for economic fibre production for all new processing lines at currently high straw prices of more than 150 € t−1. Throughputs in the range from 4 to 6 t h−1 showed a favourable relation between profit and investment cost. At throughputs higher than 6 t h−1, the profit per ton processed straw can be further increased. But investment and straw logistic cost increase at these high-throughput levels often much faster.