Effect of Paper Property on Mechanical Property of Paper Tube

Paper recycling is an effective way in reducing deforestation and energy consumption. Therefore recycling paper and paper products has been widely applied in many areas, such as packaging industry, film rolls, adhesive-tape industry, furniture decoration and temporary structures in building. They can be produced into various structure according to different requirement, such as paper tube, corrugated paperboard and normal paperboard. Paper-tubes gain more and more applications as a traditional structure due to their excellent mechanical property and environmentally friendly property. In order to meet various needs of paper-tube and produce high performance paper-tubes, designing for paper-tubes fabrication is needed. It is necessary to research the lateral compression strength of paper tube because various paper-tubes are used as packages, cores, poles and structure materials. To establish a relation of mechanical property between paperboards and paper-tubes is an important aspect. The current study is to investigate this relation. Paperboards are built from cellulose fibers jointed by hydrogen bonds and some additional elements like talc. The fibers are distributed randomly on the paperboards. However due to the tension action during fabrication process, more fibers are distributed in machine rolling direction which is defined as machine direction (MD, TD for transverse direction). The material expresses obvious anisotropic property. On the other hand, due to the laminated structure of paper materials, it is possible to generate interlaminar fracture in the usage process, especially in the construction made of paper such as paper tubes. The mechanical property of three kinds of paperboards used for paper-tubes fabrication was investigated included tension, compression and peeling combining with anisotropic property.These three kinds of paperboards have different mechanical properties but same dimension for paper-tubes fabrications. By this method, the effects of different properties including tension, compression and peeling on mechanical property of paper-tube could be evaluated. A series of paper-tubes with different layers was fabricated and the lateral compression test was carried out and evaluated. The fracture form of paper-tubes and fracture position on paper-tube were discussed together with paperboards. The cause of delamination behavior of laminated paper was analysis based on the detailed observation. The optical observation were employed to evaluate the fracture properties of paper-tubes after lateral compression test. It was found that the initial fracture of paper-tubes occurred inside the paperboards rather than between layers and the peeling property of paperboard has a signification effects on lateral compression property of paper-tubes.Copyright © 2015 by ASME