Title
Rapid determination of average fiber length of wood pulp by visible spectroscopy coupled with multivariate analysis
Authors
LINGLING LI LI-PING XIN LIANG HE XIN-SHENG CHAI and RUNQUAN CHEN

Received February 20, 2016
Published Volume 51 Issue 7-8 July-August
Keywords wood pulp, average fiber length, visible spectroscopy, multivariate analysis

Abstract
This paper reports on a new method for the rapid determination of the average fiber length of wood pulp, based on multivariate analysis assisted visible spectroscopy. Using selected data preprocessing techniques, i.e., Savitzky-Golay and multiple scattering corrections, for the spectra (400-780 nm) of fiber suspensions and partial least square regression (PLSR), a predictive model for determining the average fiber length of pulp was established. The results show that the model has good precision and robustness, in which the square of the regression coefficient (R2) was 0.984, the root mean square error of cross-validation (RMSECV) was 0.046, and the relative prediction error (RPE) was 4.15%. The new method can be used as an efficient tool for the rapid determination of the average fiber length of wood pulps in the paper industry.