POSSIBILITY OF INDUSTRIAL EXPLOITATION OF LANTANA PLANT

Abstract

Indian paper industry is passing through a crisis due to shortage of raw materials, high cost of energy, huge consumption of water and power" and generation of huge pollutants. The industries are capital intensive. Among these all, raw material shortage is one of the major problem. Paper industries are always in search for possible non wood raw material that can replace woody raw material. Lantana camara, a plant of Verbenaceae/ Vervain family, is available in huge quantity in northern India can be a good raw material for papermaking. In this dissertation work the potential of Lantana camara is evaluated for papermaking. Since the raw material is new and no correlations are available to evaluate the results, here in this report a statistical model has been developed to predict the yield, kappa number, brightness etc. Also, an attempt is made to develop an H Factor and Kappa number based controller for batch digester based on Lantana camara. For this, pulping studies at different conditions of temperature (i.e.150°C, 160°C, and 170 °C), Sulphidity (i.e.15%, 17% and 19%) and time at temperature (1.5, 2.0 and 2.5 hours) were done in laboratory. The regression equations were developed using design of experiments. According to this the number of factors chosen was three (Temperature, Time and Sulphidity) with three levels. Orders of reaction and activation energy were calculated from delignification kinetics. Further, H factor calculation was done according to various models in literature for different pulpings. A basic control strategy was developed for batch digester based on H factor and kappa number for Lantana camara.