Date of Award

4-1998

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

Department

Paper Science and Engineering

Abstract

Ever since the late 1960' s, the concern for finding suitable replacements to wood fibers within a paper making medium has been one of the focuses for the industry. At the current time, there are only a limited amount of mills that actually utilize non-wood fibers in order to satisfy the demand for paper within developing countries. Much of the use of non-wood fibers stems from the fact that there are only limited amounts of suitable woody raw materials available to sustain their paper industry. Also, areas that dispose of their agricultural resdiues by burning the remaining stalks is starting to be discouraged. The end result is that non-wood fibers pose an interesting question to North American recycle mills which normally reject these grades of paper. In the coming years, the need to use grades of paper that contain non-wood fibers will increase in order to minimize the waste generated by their disposal. Therefore, a need to increase the knowledge of how non-wood fibers will influence paper strength properties through multiple recycles must be investigated.

Through this research project, the strength properties over four recycles were evaluated for paper which contained only softwood fibers and a mixture of softwood and wheat straw fibers. Also, handsheets that contained only wheat straw fibers were produced as a standard of comparison. Through each of the recycles, the addition of wheat straw fibers proved not to detract from the paper strength properties.

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