ZnCl2 pretreatment of bamboo chips to produce chemi-thermomechanical pulp: Saving refining energy and improving pulp properties

Abstract

The pretreatment of biomass materials is critical for improvement of the overall production process and product quality. In this work, a dilute zinc chloride (ZnCl2) solution was used to pretreat bamboo chips, followed by defiberization (mechanical pulping). Compared to the results from the traditional chemi-thermomechanical pulping process, the results from this study showed that the refining energy consumption of the modified process was lowered 27%, and the tensile and burst index of the resultant pulp increased 22% and 82%, respectively. The morphological changes on the fiber surface, functional groups, and crystallinity of resultant pulps due to the ZnCl2 treatment were also analyzed.

Feasibility of Substituting Soda Pulping with High Consistency Kneaded Chemi Mechanical Pulping for Discarded Oyster Farming Bamboo Scaffolding

“…The process began with bamboo softening, extruding, and nally chemical treatment, which the pulping yields after re ning are 62.52% (TSE) and 79.78% (MSD). Hu et al (2018) extruded the bamboo, treated the materials with ZnCl 2 , and then re ned the materials, which had a pulping yield of 75.5% under the 10% ZnCl 2 treatment. The above research applied the extruder to pulp the bamboo, which indicates that the high-consistency mechanical treatment has the potential to be applied in bamboo CMP or CTMP.…”