| Project Detail |
The manufacturing of paper relies on suspending fibers in significant amounts of water which then need to be removed through draining, pressing, and evaporative drying. The major portion of the energy consumed is evaporative drying, accounting for 80% of the total energy used in the overall drying operation and 50% of the total in a production mill. The demand for drying can be significantly reduced with multi-phase forming technology by replacing water with a high-density foam that has approximately 50% more air in the structure in the form of small bubbles. The need for a chemical surfactant, however, is a major technical barrier for commercialization because it can complicate processing and adversely impact product properties.
Project Innovation + Advantages:
The technology proposed by the Georgia Institute of Technology avoids surfactant use to generate a stable foam by instead relying on hydrodynamic means to generate an unstable high-density foam to disperse the fiber into. The fiber mat is formed in a fast dynamic process before loss of integrity of the multi-phase fiber-air bubble mixture. The team will develop a next-generation paper manufacturing system that includes a novel microbubble generator integrated with a next generation headbox that can scale up for commercial production. The proposed approach should reduce the energy consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions associated with the production of paper, as well as other fiber composites (e.g., tissue, cardboard, nonwovens, and new fiber-based products).
Potential Impact:
The goal of the proposed technology is to replace the current method of manufacturing paper, tissue, and other fiber composite materials with a new process that will significantly reduce associated energy consumption and CO2 emissions. |
