Stiffening of cellulose fibres: a comparison between
crosslinking the fibre wall and lumen loading

Abstract: Stiffer fibres with improved resilience could lead to improvements for
example in the fluff pulp area. Fluff pulp in absorbent products often
collapse in a wet state at repeated insults. The products are also
compressed for ease of handling and lowering the shipping costs. An increase
in stiffness as well as spring back could solve the collapse problem and
make the fibres spring back better after the compression, leading to better
products. Two methods were used to improve these properties, crosslinking of
the fibre wall using Butanetetracarboxylicacid (BTCA) and loading the lumen
with TiO2.

Wet stiffness was improved for unbeaten fibres, both from laboratory made
sheets and machine made sheets, when BTCA was added. For the beaten pulp,
the shape of the fibres may explain why these fibres did not exhibit
improvements in wet stiffness. No improvements in spring back could be seen
for any of the tested fibres. The lumen loaded fibres gained a higher
density due to the TiO2 treatment and since the samples were tested on a
weight basis, a good comparison could not be done.