Hello there Linus Kron! After four years in the business research school Resource Smart Processes, you have just recently defended your thesis, congratulations! What is your thesis about?
– My thesis is about understanding the basic chemistry behind the cooking step in the sulphate process (the most common chemical process for making pulp). In short, I have investigated how fast molecules move inside wood fibers, and found that this transport probably has a greater impact than previously thought.
Link to the thesis:
Hardwood Kraft Delignification
Why are your results important – for industry, research or society at large?
– The pulp and paper industry will play an important role in helping us reduce our dependence on products from fossil sources, such as plastics. However, they are large and complex processes, so to continue improving them to create new products and optimize material/energy consumption, we first need to better understand the chemistry behind the process steps.
“For example, my results could help improve the development of new simulation models or so-called digital twins. This would allow us to simulate the cooking process more realistically and find new ways to run it more resource-efficiently.
What has been most surprising or instructive?
– It would probably be the realization of how incredibly complicated the whole pulping process actually is, despite the fact that we can run it on such a large scale.
What do you hope people will take away from reading your thesis?
– Working with pulp is not as simple and boring as people (including myself, before I started researching it!) might think. As I said, the cooking process is a complicated one that we still don’t fully understand, and there are several parts we should investigate further.
What will you do next?
– I have some small projects left to finish here at Chalmers, then it will be a move and a new job in RnD development. It is a new industry, but still process industry.
