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Treesearch Insight 2023

7. Improved CTMP impregnation by the use of X-ray fluorescence (XRF) measurements

Defibration of wood chips in high yield pulping such as CTMP production involves sulfonation of wood chips using (Na2SO3). When aiming to improve product properties, one key issue to investigate is the evenness of the sulfonation, i.e., the distribution of the sulfite (SO32-) ions. The challenge is that the inner parts of the wood chips absorb much less sodium sulfite than the outer parts. As a result, less sulfonated wood fibers have different bonding properties. It is likely so that the efficiency and evenness of fiber separation in a chip refiner depend greatly on how evenly the chips have been sulfonated. Uneven sulfonation then results in higher shives (unseparated fibers) content which impairs product properties. We suggest a laboratory-scale miniaturized X-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanner for measuring sulfur distribution in the wood chips on-site. By minimizing the differences in sulfonate content between fibers, we can minimize the requirement for sulfite (SO32-) dosage to a certain degree of fiber separation, thereby reducing the total amount of electricity used in chip refining. There has been a significant improvement in commercial XRF microscopy scanners over the last few years, but the spatial resolutions achieved are insufficient. We have developed an XRF scanner optimized for sulfur fluorescence energies [1], and further continued this development by implementing frontier technology polycapillary X-ray optics. We present spatial resolution measurements and discuss the relevance and usability of the proposed measurement methodology to demonstrate its performance.

[1] Rahman, H., et.al, ACS Omega 2022, 7, 51, 48555–48563, DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.2c07086″