Use of cellulose fibers from wheat straw for sustainable cement mortars

In the present research, an environmentally sustainable material as wheat straw deriving from Apulia region, Southern Italy, was added to cement mortars and characterized by thermal, acoustic, mechanical, and microstructural measurements. The straw and the matrix composition were not modified and the mixture preparation did not require complex manufacturing or expensive procedures. The aim was to obtain a lightweight product for indoor applications using a renewable material from the agro-food industry and adopting a safe and cheap process. The samples with high straw content showed very low thermal conductivities exceeding 0.16 W/mK and good acoustic absorptions in the 500–1000 Hz range. The results were strongly dependent on the porosity of the composites, ascribed to the straw features and to the voids at the cellulose fibers/cement matrix interface. Moreover, preliminary observations of the material stability (microstructural analysis) demonstrated that the conglomerate components did not show detectable effects of degradation.