Wood Supply Strategies to Enhance the Maritime Pine Kraft Pulp Quality, 2004 Engineering, Pulping and PCE&I Conference

To better adapt the pulpwood supply to the industrial needs and to enhance the papermaking potential of the maritime pine Kraft fibers, AFOCEL has created models, simplified into charts to help foresters to meet mill requirements [9]. A broad sampling of pulpwood logs and sawmill chips was undertaken to validate the theoretical models. Vegetal material consisted 52 trees from five selected stands aging from 17 to 55 years and different sawmill chips. Kraft cooking was performed in a MK Systems pilot digester, in order to reach Kappa 35-40 and 80-90, then refined using a 12’’ disks Andritz refiner pilot. In a second part of the work, simulations of mixtures containing different wood assortments were studied to help the mills to define the best supply methods according to the available forest resources. The results obtained from this work validate the trends of the model, which can be used to elaborate various strategies of qualitative wood supply. Different wood lot assortments are proposed based on (i) diameter of the pulp logs and/or (ii) growth rate of the stands. The potential gains in terms of physical properties of pulps were estimated from the different wood supply strategies.