Effect of Acacia melanoxylon wood density on papermaking potential

In this work we study the behaviour in kraft cooking and papermaking of 6 Acacia melanoxylon wood chip samples, with basic densities of 449, 489, 493, 505, 514 and 616 kg/m3. The wood chip samples were screened and submitted to the kraft cooking process. Experiments were carried out with 1000-g o.d. of wood in a forced circulation digester. The cooked chips were disintegrated, screened and washed. The screened and total yields, kappa number and pulp viscosity were determined according to the standard methods. The morphological properties of pulp fibres were determined by image analysis of a diluted suspension in a flow chamber in Morfi®. The unbleached kraft pulps were submitted to a bleaching D0E1D1E2D2 sequence and their papermaking potential evaluated. The pulps were beaten in a PFI mill at 500, 2500 and 4500 revolutions under a refining intensity of 1.7 N/mm. Paper handsheets were prepared according to the Scan standard and tested regarding structural, mechanical and optical properties. Regarding the pulping potential, the pulp yield ranged between 47.7 and 57.7%. The selected wood samples provided bleached kraft pulps with markedly different biometrics characteristics. In fact, the mean values of fibre length, fibre width and coarseness ranged between 0.77 and 0.98 mm, 17.8 and 19.4 μm, 4.8 and 6.2 mg/100m, respectively. As expected, these biometrics characteristics have very high impact on paper structure, including smoothness, and on mechanical and optical properties, for the unbeaten pulps. At a given beaten level, the differences between pulps remain very high. Moreover, for a given paper density, tensile and tear strength, and light scattering coefficient are significantly different. To reach a given paper density, however, the different pulps required very different energy consumptions in beating

Financiación y empleo en la UE: desigualdad, endeudamiento y segmemtación del mercado de trabajo

This article examines the link between financialisation and work in five EU countries representative of different types of financial system and welfare regime: Sweden, Germany, the UK, Portugal and Polannd. This is done by way of a crosss-country comparative exercise that analyses micro-level survey data on household income, debt, and working conditions. Notwithstanding some differences across the countries, living conditions have worsened after the global financial crisis (GFC) for a substantial number of households, as reflected in respondents`reports of declining household income, recourse to debt to cover living expenses and deteriorated employment relation. As the finance-work nexus has been more detrimental to low-income and non-standard workers in Germany and Poland, the article concludes that the impacts of financialisatios on well-being cannot be simply infarred from the sizes of national financial systems or the extent of household engagement with finance, nor from extant welfare regime typologies. To better account for these impacts one also needs to consider the more intermediate effects of finance on well-being through labour market segmentationEste artículo analiza la conexión entre financiación y trabajo en cinco países de la UE, representativos por exhibir diferentes sistemas financieros y distintos modelos de bienestar: Suecia, Alemania, Reino Unido, Portugal y Polonia. Dicho ejercicio comparativo se lleva a cabo analizando microdatos de renta familiar, endeudamiento y condiciones de trabajo. Más allá de las diferencias entre países, las condiciones de vida han empeorado a raíz de la Crisis Financiera Global (CFG) para un número sustantivo de hogares, como muestran la caída en la renta de las unidades familiares, el incremento del endeudamiento para cubrir gastos corrientes y el deterioro de las relaciones laborales. Dado que el nexo finanzas-empleo ha sido más dañino para los trabajadores atípicos y de bajos ingresos tanto en Alemania como em Polonia, el artículo llega a la conclusión de que el impacto de la financiarización sobre el bienestar no puede ser inferido simplemente atendiendo al tamaño de los sistemas financieros nacionales, al grado de inclusión de las economías domésticas en el ámbito financiero o a la tipología específica del modelo de bienestar existente en cada paí