Rice stems for the material of straw rope are desired to be soft, but there is no method to measure the degree of softness.
Softness contains compressibility, flexibility, stiffness and other quality.
In order to set up physical scale of softness, we made some apparatuses and tested out them.
(1) The first one is to measure the compressibility of the rice sheaf. (fig. 1)
We measured the rate of shrinkage of the rice sheaf.
(2) The second one is to measure flexibility of straw. (fig. 2)
We measured bending of the free end of straw.
(3) The third one is to measure stiffness of straw. (fig. 3)
We measured torsion stress of the rice straw.
(4) The last one is to calculate the times of twist. (fig. 4)
We twisted the rice straw and inquired the relation between softness and breaking strength.
In this experiment, we softened rice straw by the softening machine of the roll type.
Rice straws were passed from 2 to 30times between two rolls respectively.
The results are as follows.
(1) In the early stage of softening, from 2 to 4 times of pass, (compressibility) and flexibility increase rapidly, and stiffness decreases also rapidly. In the next stage, this tendency become smaller gradually.
(2) It seems too early to decide the physical scale of softness of plants. But in case of rice stems for straw rope, we want to set the physical scale having 5 classes as shown in the table.
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