Surfactant - Resin Interactions and Mill Use of Alcohol Ethoxylate Surfactants, 1998 Pulping Conference Proceedings

Optimizing surfactant - wood resin interactions will improve the effectiveness of mill processes that require liquor -resin interactions. These processes include wood chip digestion, deresination, and pitch control. The emphasis in this report will be on deresination and pitch control because laboratory findings have been validated by mill results (1).

Laboratory test results reported herein indicate:

- for a given hydrophobe, maximum deresination efficiency is obtained when the alcohol ethoxylate cloud point is approximately equal to the process temperature
- deresination efficiency increased with decreasing interfacial tension against a model wood resin
- dynamic surface tension may be used to predict relative surfactant performance in deresination
- a surfactant predicted by analogy to laboratory test results (cloud point and interfacial tension measurements) to perform well as a pitch control agent exhibited outstanding performance in a mill study and is now being used commercially