Etude expérimentale et conception d’un procède industriel de fabrication de cuir de poisson.

Abstract

Leather production is an activity which is part of the culture of our country. It highlights the beauty of wildlife heritage through the enhancement by tanning the skins of different species of animals. Although the protection and disappearance of certain species limits the scope of this sector, tanneries are increasingly exploring new sources of skins supply. It is in this sense that the scientific research that furnished our end-of-study project focused on ‘THE EXPERIMENTAL STUDY AND DESIGN OF AN INDUSTRIAL PROCESS OF MANUFACTURING LEATHER FROM FISH SKIN’. Its aim was to promote the use and marketing of fish leather in the form of technical objects. For this study, our choice was “Heterotis niloticus”, commonly known as “KANGA”. It is a fish that grows in the rivers of Africa and mainly in Nyon and Bénoué in Cameroon, and in countries like Congo, Gabon, and the Ivory Coast. This choice was intended to give more value to this fish, whose exploitation is limited to culinary arts, by means of luxury leather, usable in the textile or even clothing industry. Thus, after the supply, we proceeded with the flaking and stripping of the skin, which were treated to make them imputrescible and exploitable. The material obtained was used to make a technical object with a mixture of raffia fibres, which generated waste. This result allowed us to simulate an industrial process that uses high-performance machines including the logistics required at each stage of manufacturing. Kanga fish skin has proven to be a source of raw material for tannery processing and the exploitation of the latter opens up new markets in the fisheries, livestock and agriculture sectors.