Pilot Plant Facilities

Pulping

Sample Preparation and Chip Testing:

• Disc chipper – Chipping of wood logs or bamboo
• Thickness, Round hole, Tyler sieve chip classification
• Wood chip bark, rot and contaminant content; basic wood or bulk density

Cooking:

• simulates continuous or batch kraft or Soda process with or without additives/surfactants and pre-hydrolysis studies using steam, water, or acid.
• 2 – 3 kg OD sample per cook
  • Benefits include:
  • Most reliable yield data comparable to pulp mill data,
  • Customizability; eg. additives may be applied during cook, or layer cooks,
  • Larger pulp sample than smaller reactors that typically allows for brown and bleached (downstream) pulp strength studies

• simulate batch kraft or soda-AQ, and custom projects.
• 700 – 900g OD sample per cook for 6-L reactor and 80 – 100 g OD sample per cook for 1-L reactor
  • Benefits include:
  • Multiple cooks completed simultaneously in oil bath (up to three 6-L reactors and six 1-L reactors)
  • Small sample size accommodated
  • Excellent method for optimizing conditions or establishing target conditions
  • Ability to withstand high pressure cooks

Screening:

• Simulate defibering and washing
• Range of plate sizes: 0.004”, 0.006”, 0.008”, 0.010”, 0.012”, 0.014”, 0.018”, 0.042”
• Pin shredding screened pulp for representative sample testing

Refining:

• Interchangeable plates and patterns
• Refine with plate gap from 0.05” to 0.055”
• Available for running basic mechanical pulping studies
• Determine wood brightness from chips
• Refine fiber bundles or shives from high kappa cooks to desired target freeness