Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The goal of this project is to maintain and increase the competitiveness of the Canadian pulp and paper industryby making better use of wood and fibre resources. This will be achieved by applying state-of-the-art technologyand tools to measure wood and fibre quality in the forest, quantify fibre variability, and identify regions withsuperior wood quality in order to extract maximum value from the forest resource. Pulp and paper is the largestmanufacturing industry in Canada and is particularly important to the economy of Atlantic Canada, where theforest industry represents approximately $2.6 billion in real GDP and over 25,000 primary jobs. The proposedresearch, to be conducted in collaboration with partners Paprican and Corner Brook Pulp and Paper, willimprove the cost-competitiveness of the industry by linking incoming fibre quality to process and productperformance, and providing the tools to monitor and control incoming wood quality for improved processstability, reduced operating costs and enhanced product performance.The key objectives of the project are to use state-of-the-art field sensors to measure properties in standing treesor on chip streams feeding Corner Brook Pulp and Paper, establish databases of wood and fibre properties thatcan be incorporated into a digital forest inventory (GIS) framework, and develop models relating key wood andfibre properties to processing parameters and end-product properties. The technical challenges will be to applythe new optical (NIR-based) sensor technologies by developing accurate calibration curves that are specific tothe Corner Brook region of Newfoundland. Although the project is focused on the wood/fibre supply chain ofCorner Brook Pulp and Paper, the industry partner for this project, it will be a demonstration case for theCanadian pulp and paper industry on how to maximize fibre/wood value. An estimated 20 to 30 mills inCanada can potentially benefit from the results of the research.