ASD has signed a strategic alliance agreement with Paprican to develop the pulp and paper industry's first application of near-infrared (NIR) technology to measure pulp brightness and lignin content
The new analysers promise to optimise lab and industrial measurements of these parameters leading to better control of the manufacturing process with reduced costs and better environmental performance.
The ASD NIR spectrometer measures pulp brightness and Kappa Number - a measure of lignin, the material that bonds wood together and which must be chemically removed in order to make bleached paper products.
"We are constantly looking for opportunities to make our member companies more competitive with the development of innovative new technologies," said Paprican's director of contracts, patents, and licensing, Chris Kanters.
"Our goal, in this case, is to simplify an expensive, labour-intensive, chemical testing procedure with ASD's NIR technology.
"The benefit of this technology is improved productivity, speed of measurement, and accuracy, giving our member manufacturing companies a competitive edge in today's expanding global market".
ASD's system will allow for fast, precise, and non-invasive measurement of lignin content in pulp.
This new method replaces the need for chemical techniques that use expensive chemicals to determine lignin content and that are often prone to operator error.
The new method eliminates chemical and processing costs.
The strategic alliance between Paprican and ASD will lead to both bench-top and online versions of the Kappa and brightness analyser.
"Though in beta stage right now, the commercial applications we are developing with Paprican represent the evolution of quality standards in the pulp and paper industry," said ASD director of business development, Michael Lands.
"This technology has the potential to introduce optimization and control improvements that positively impact the industry." About Paprican.
Paprican, the Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada, is a leading not-for-profit research and technology institute that provides valuable technology transfer and cost-competitive research addressing both the short-term and strategic needs of its members.
Its research programmes are driven by the high-priority technical issues of the industry such as product quality and value, cost competitiveness, environment, and sustainability.
Internationally recognised for excellence, Paprican operates laboratories in Quebec and British Columbia, and is well positioned to offer services to the global pulp and paper industry.
About ASD.
Based in Boulder and with customers around the world, ASD provides the most reliable, high-performance analytical instrumentation solutions to industrial professionals, analytical researchers, and remote sensing scientists.
In collaboration with our customers since 1990, our applications support team remains unsurpassed in solving some of the world's most challenging materials measurement problems.
