PAPER SUPPLIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 83, 10 April 1939, Page 8

PAPER SUPPLIES

RESEARCH EQUIPMENT

BIG EMPIRE PROGRAMME

(By Air Mail, from "The Post's" London Representative.)

LONDON, March 13,

To keep pace with the recent advances in pulp and paper-testing, which have led to the development of new apparatus and an improved technique, important additions have been, made to the equipment of the laboratories at the Imperial Institute devoted to examination of paper - making materials.

A considerable amount of valuable preliminary work on the paper-making properties of Empire raw . materials has already been carried out, but a heavier programme is expected in the future. Ever-increasing pressure on existing sources of the world's paper pulp must, gradually but inevitably, direct attention to the possibilities of developing new sources of supply and new raw materials in many parts of the British Empire hitherto untapped. It is anticipated, therefore, that the institute will be called up in future to carry out full and reliable investigations of many forms of Empire raw materials in order to test their suitability for paper-making. The institute is now in a position to make comprehensive tests of paper-making materials in accordance with the most modern laboratory methods. The new equipment consists of the following:—(1) A British standard sheet machine;. (2) a Lampen mill; (3) a constant tempera-ture-constant humidity room; (4) paper-testing apparatus.

The purpose of the new apparatus is to enable sheets of paper to be made from a small quantity of any type of paper pulp, the paper being made under rigidly standardised conditions so that the standard sheets obtained are strictly uniform and capable of comparative tests. It is, therefore, possible by the use of the standard sheet machine, in conjunction with the papertesting equipment, to determine the strength and other properties of pulps obtained from any new raw materials and to assess cheir value and uses in comparison with commercial pulps.

In view of the constant growth in the world's demands for paper, these developments are probably only "fore" runners of large expansion in the future.