Novel Applications of Viscoplastic Fluids: Creating New Products for the Pulp and Paper Sector

自然资源的丰收是加拿大经济蓬勃发展的支柱。没有一个可行的纸浆和造纸工业，就不可能有一个可行的林业工业。传统上，不列颠哥伦比亚省和加拿大的纸浆和造纸行业一直是美国市场的新闻纸出口商。最近的经济低迷，加上无纸化通信的颠覆性技术，导致新闻纸和通信用纸的消耗量减少了40%。这一转折点意味着森林业的生存取决于加拿大开发高质量BC木纤维的创新新用途的能力。 尽管市场发生了这些变化，但不列颠哥伦比亚省和加拿大森林业的未来是光明的，消费者更广泛地接受基于纤维的材料和产品的时机可能再好不过了。我们对环境和气候变化的关注转移，使得使用天然木材纤维成为对地球友好的选择，而不是传统的基于化石的材料和其他不可再生材料。从历史上看，在塑料革命之前，纤维是许多消费级产品的主导材料，包括服装、墙面覆盖物、地毯衬垫，当然还有杂货袋。我们希望在可预见的未来用树建造房屋，因此将有大量高质量的残留木纤维。森林业的竞争力取决于提取高价值纤维以创造新产品或新工艺的能力。 这项建议提出了一种新的平台技术，即流体动力聚焦与反应性多流体分层相结合，以微米或纳米纤维为基础开发新产品，即木材纤维的积木。这种生产方法是基于对蜘蛛丝生产的生物模拟，目的是生产高性能的生物复合材料，如线、细丝、中空管或薄膜。如果可行，工业生产的并行化立即成为可能。提出了一项为期五年的项目来探索这项技术。它将由一名博士后研究员、一名博士后和一名机械工程化学专业的硕士研究生负责。

The harvest of natural resources is the backbone of the thriving Canadian economy. Without a viable pulp and paper industry it is not possible to have a viable forestry industry. Traditionally, BC and Canada’s pulp and paper sector has been a newsprint exporter to the US market. The recent economic downturn, coupled with disruptive technologies for paperless communication, has resulted in a 40% reduction in newsprint and communication paper consumption. This turning point means that the forest industry’s survival depends on Canada’s ability to develop innovative new uses for high quality BC wood fibers. Despite these market changes, the future of the forest industry in BC and Canada is bright-green, and the timing for a broader consumer acceptance of fiber based materials and products may never be better. Our shifting focus on the environment and climate change makes the use of natural wood fiber a significantly planet friendly choice over traditional fossil based and other non-renewable materials. Historically, before the plastic revolution, fiber was the dominant material for many consumer level products, including clothing, wall coverings, carpet underlay, and of course, grocery bags. We expect to be constructing houses from trees for the foreseeable future and as a result there will be an abundance of high quality residual wood fibre. The competitiveness of the forest industry is dependent on the ability to extract high value fibre to create novel products or processes. This proposal addresses a novel platform technology, i.e. hydrodynamic focusing coupled with reactive multi-fluid layering to develop novel products from micro- or nano-fibrillated cellulose, i.e. building blocks of wood fibers. This production methodology is based upon bio-mimicry of the production of a spider’s silk with the goal of producing high performance bio-composites such as threads, filaments, hollow tubes or films. If feasible, parallelization for industrial production is immediately possible. A five year project is proposed to explore this technology. It will be conducted by one Post-Doctoral fellow, one PhD and one MASc student in either Chemical of Mechanical Engineering.