G. Chantre et al., COMPARISON OF 2 METHODS FOR ESTIMATING TH E VARIABILITY OF THE KRAFT PULPING PROPERTIES OF POPLAR CLONES, Canadian journal of forest research, 24(7), 1994, pp. 1419-1425
Two different methods are applied to evaluate the variability of wood
ability for Kraft pulping of 25 poplar clones (1-year-old trees). The
first one consists in pulping almost all of the wood of each analyzed
tree (''macro-pulpings''). The second one is based on pulping very sma
ll wood samples, entire cross sections close to 1 g, taken at 50-cm he
ight (micropulpings and paper microtests). This paper presents the res
ults found separately with the two methods for the following parameter
s: pulp yield, Kappa (kappa) index or permanganate index, and average
fiber length. We observed that the evaluations of these parameters ded
uced by microtests are always well correlated with those obtained from
pulping of the whole trees. Moreover, the two methods reveal that the
suitability of poplar wood for Kraft pulping is under genetic control
at age 1. But for each parameter (especially the ratio (kappa index)/
(pulping yield)2 and the average weighted fiber length), the different
iation of the clones is never exactly the same. Therefore, it is neces
sary to slightly modify the micropulping and microtests methodology to
evaluate with better accuracy the pulp and paper properties of the wh
ole trees.