Author: Maria Cristina Area
Publisher: Smithers Pira
Published: 2014-05-06
Total Pages: 120
ISBN-13: 1909030872
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Firs and pines dominated the global picture of the raw materials for paper industry until the 1950s. At that time, the interest in introducing new species, mostly hardwoods, led the researchers intensify efforts to look for the fibrous characteristics and their combinations that could represent the relationship between fibres, pulp and paper.The pulp and paper industry has shown, mainly in the last two decades, a strong North-South displacement. This is to a large extent due to the favourable climate, which promote the development of the trees. Similarly, the paper fibres have gone from being almost exclusively softwoods from natural forests of the Northern-Hemisphere cold regions, such as spruce and fir, to fast growing species of short fibres, such as eucalyptus, and willow and poplar hybrids from plantations.These new species, that begin to dominate the paper panorama, not only differ from classic ones in fibre length, but they present particular characteristics, like large amounts of juvenile wood, different fibrillar angle and so on, because trees are used increasingly at younger age.This leads us to question whether the old paradigms concerning the relationships between fibres characteristics and pulp properties are still valid or should be reviewed and updated, in which case, the basic fibre parameters, their influence in pulping and refining, and their impact on paper quality should be redefined.To establish the state-of-the-art on the topic, this book analyses the publications of the last decade to verify the morphological characteristics of the fibres which are nowadays considered relevant. Relatively recent data were surveyed because of the continuous changes that occur in the species by genetic improvement.
