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Carboxylated bleached kraft pulp from maleic anhydride copolymers

  • Hongfeng Zhang , Ester Tsenter , Paul Bicho , Erin A. S. Doherty , Richard Riehle , Jose Moran-Mirabal and Robert H. Pelton ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: August 24, 2021
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Abstract

Seven copolymers of maleic anhydride were hydrolyzed and impregnated into sheets of bleached softwood kraft pulps to enhance market pulp properties. Drying the impregnated pulps at 120 °C for 10 minutes, attached to the fiber surfaces up 0.16 meq of carboxyl groups per gram of dry pulp. Heating the impregnated pulps regenerates succinic anhydride moieties which can then form stable ester linkages with cellulosic hydroxyls. The pH of the impregnation solution is important. Impregnation with solutions at pH 8 gave polymer contents without repulping issues. By contrast, impregnation at pH 4 gave dried pulp sheets that were too strong to enable repulping in a paper mill. Although most of the seven copolymers were fixed to cellulose, poly(ethylene-alt-maleic anhydride) gave the highest density of carboxyl groups. The simplicity of waterborne polymers and mild drying temperatures suggests maleic anhydride copolymer treatment could be implemented in a conventional market pulp mill.

Award Identifier / Grant number: CRDPJ 531816-18

Funding statement: We thank the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC CRDPJ 531816-18) and our industrial partners, Solenis Canada and Canfor for funding this project.

Acknowledgments

Drs. Anton Esser and Joel Soucy, BASF are acknowledged for supporting the inception of this project. R. H. Pelton holds the Canada Research Chair in Interfacial Technologies and J. M. Moran-Mirabal holds the Canada Research Chair in Micro- and Nanostructured Materials.

  1. Conflict of interest: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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Supplemental Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/npprj-2021-0005).


Received: 2021-01-20
Accepted: 2021-03-10
Published Online: 2021-08-24
Published in Print: 2021-12-20

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