Speaker
Description
Porous cellulose networks form the structural backbone of absorbent hygiene materials, where internal pore architecture directly governs fluid retention capacity. Despite this, engineering-focused investigation of tampon pore structure remains scarce. This study applies micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) combined with the sub-network of an over-segmented watershed (SNOW) algorithm and PoreSpy to characterize the three-dimensional pore structure of tampon proxy materials made from round and trilobal cellulose viscose fibres after liquid absorption. Otsu segmentation was used to binarize the reconstructed volumes, and pore size distributions were extracted as pore equivalent diameters (PED) across four spatial positions per sample.
Trilobal fibre proxies exhibited consistently larger pores than their round-fibre counterparts, with median PED values 26–32% higher across all measurement positions, despite comparable bulk porosity (~82–85%). This finding highlights that bulk porosity alone is insufficient to characterize absorbent performance, and that pore size, shaped by fibre cross-sectional geometry, is the more discriminating parameter. The higher surface area and longitudinal channel structures of trilobal fibres promote more extensive network expansion upon liquid uptake, yielding a more open pore architecture and 18.7% greater absorbency. Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance analyses confirm that inter-fibre differences in pore structure substantially exceed intra-sample positional variations, underscoring the dominant influence of fibre geometry over production-induced gradients. A systematic top-to-bottom decrease in pore size was also observed, likely reflecting one-sided liquid application and compression effects during manufacturing. These results establish micro-CT combined with SNOW-based void space partitioning as an effective methodology for characterizing pore networks in fibrous cellulose materials and provide a mechanistic basis for optimizing absorbent product design.