Kraft process wood pulping

Fig. 11. Flow diagram for the beater additive process. Kraft represents the kraft process wood pulp and NC is nitrocellulose used as starting materials...

Highly bleached and purified kraft process wood pulp suitable for conversion into products such as rayon, viscose, acetate, and cellophane... 

Bleached or unbleached kraft process wood pulp usually converted into paperboard, coarse papers, tissue papers, and fine papers such as business, writing and printing... 

Commercially, most cellulose is extracted from wood by one of two methods, the kraft (sulfate) process or the steam explosion process. The product of these reactions is wood pulp, which consists primarily of cellulose. In the kraft process, wood chips are treated with a solution of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) and sodium sulfide (Na2S) at temperatures of about 175°C (35o°F) for two to six hours. This process usually results in a yield of about 40 to 45 percent wood pulp. The pulp is then treated with a bleaching agent, such as calcium or sodium hypochlorite (Ca(0Cl)2 or NaCIO) or chlorine dioxide (C102) to remove the color of lignin and other impurities. 

Kraft Process. The dominant chemical wood pulping process is the kraft or sulfate process. The alkaline pulping Hquor or digesting solution contains about a three-to-one ratio of sodium hydroxide, NaOH, and sodium sulfide, Na2S. The name kraft, which means strength in German,... 

Manufacture. The oldest method for producing Na2S is by the reduction of sodium sulfate with carbon in a refractory oven at 900—1000°C. Whereas this method is no longer used commercially in the United States, a variation is used to produce sodium sulfide captively during kraft pulp processing to replace lost sodium and sulfur values that were initiated into the system by merchant-suppHed sodium sulfide. In this method, sodium sulfate is added to the system in the recovery furnace, where it is reduced by carbon from the wood pulp to produce sodium sulfide. 

Kraft pulping is a common process in the paper industry. Figure 8.4 shows a simplifled flowsheet of the process. In this process, wood chips are reacted (cooked) with white liquor in a digester. White liquor (which contains primarily NaOH, NaiS, Na2C03 and water) is employed to dissolve lignin from the wood chips. The cooked pulp and liquor are passed to a blow tank where the pulp is separated from the spent liquor weak black liquor which is fed to a recovery system for... 

Table 21.3 presents an overview of wood pulping types by the method of fiber separation, resultant fiber quality, and percent of 1998 U.S. pulp production.1112 Many mills perform multiple pulping processes at the same site, most frequently nondeink secondary fiber pulping and paper-grade kraft... 

The kraft process evolved from the soda process. The soda process uses an alkaline liquor of only sodium hydroxide (NaOH). The kraft process has virtually replaced the soda process due to the economic benefits of chemical recovery and improved reaction rates (the soda process has a lower yield of pulp per pound of wood furnish than the kraft process). 

Detailed discussion of the classical wood pulping processes - e.g., the Sulfite and Kraft processes - is available in the literature [14]. Pre-treatments that aim to facilitate the fermentation of lignocellulosic materials are also discussed elsewhere [49, 62-64]. 

Kraft pulping involves the cooking of wood chips at 340-350°F and 100-135 psi in liquor that contains sodium hydroxide, sodium sulfide, and sodium carbonate. This process promotes cleavage of the various ether bonds in lignin and the degradative products so formed dissolve in alkaline pulping liquor. The Kraft process normally incorporates several steps to recover chemicals from the spent black liquor [3]. 

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