Production of Paper Using Chemical Pulping Process of Sugarcane Bagasse

Abstract

There are many sources of solid waste such residential, industrial, commercial, agricultural and biomedical that cause hazardous impact on the environment. The annual production of agricultural waste in Egypt is about 34% of the total amount of waste generation. For this reason; the recycling process is applied to get rid of the different agricultural wastes. The aim of this work is the production of paper from bagasse by applying the chemical process to produce pulp using NaOH as an alkaline reagent. Response Surface Methodology (RSM) was used to optimize the process variables affecting the yield of the product namely as temperature (℃), time (min), and solid to liquid ratio (%). Thus, the mass percent of bagasse to NaOH solution is varied to be 10, 12.5, and 15 %, the temperature of reaction is changed from 160 to 180℃, and the reaction is performed for several retention time varied from 60 minutes to 180 minutes. The optimum conditions are found to be 180 min, 160℃, and solid to liquid ratio of 0.1 to produce pulp with yield equals to 56.8 g for every 100 g of sugarcane bagasse. The produced paper was characterized based on basis weight, tensile strength, tearing strength, and burst strength and it was found that the produced paper is in compliance with the commercial kraft paper.