• Heikkilä, Pirjo
• Kinnunen, Karita
• Valta, Kyösti
• Jetsu, Petri
• Harlin, Ali
• Määttänen, Marjo

Abstract

Sustainability issues of nonwoven materials can beconsidered in processing as well as in raw materialchoice. Nonwoven materials have been prepared usingwet-laying for decades, but water usage can be reduced byreplacing water with aqueous foam. With foam higher fibreconsistency can be used compared to water. Foam alsoimproves dewatering in forming section leading to lowereddrying needs and, thus, energy saving. Foam laidmaterials has extremely good formation leading to veryhomogeneous materials even with low grammage products.Another possibility is to make bulky products. Cellulosebased materials, mainly cotton, viscose and cellulosefibres, are covering only around one fifth of the rawmaterials used in nonwoven field. In recent years therehas been incentive to find more sustainable andenvironmentally friendly materials to replace cotton andsynthetic materials with man-made cellulosic fromdissolved pulp, such as viscose. Also traditional viscoseprocess, utilizing H2S can be replaced by moreenvironmentally friendly options such as lyocell usingNMMO solvent, which is already commercial process, aswell as carbamate and enzymatic biocelsol processes.In this work we studied use of foam technology innonwoven materials preparation with textile grade fibres.We also demonstrated how recycled paper could be used andraw material for nonwovens utilizing dissolving,carbamate and wet-spinning process. In this presentationadvantages of foam forming over wet laying and air layingare discussed and properties of foam formed materials,made using commercial cellulosic fibres as well as fibresmade from cardboard, are presented.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• spinning
• dissolving