One way of satisfying increased market demand and simultaneously achieving a reduced environmental load in the industrial paper production is the use of fibrous agricultural residues. The aims of this study were i) to investigate the effect of alkaline - hydrodynamic cavitation (HC) pre-treatments on the delignification of Miscanthus × giganteus stalks (MGS) and ii) establishing the suitability of MGS as feedstock and their exploitation in pulp and paper manufacturing. It was demonstrated that the proposed treatment is an efficient delignification method for the non-wood fiber sources, such as miscanthus. A significant outcome of this work was the observation that HC treatment preserved the fibres lengths and surface quality of raw MGS, but at the same time increased the amount of kinked and curled fibers present in cavitated miscanthus fibers. The average miscanthus fiber length was found to be relatively short at 0.45 (±0.28) mm, while the slenderness ratio, the flexibility coefficient and Runkel ratio values were calculated to be 28.13, 38.16 and 1.62, respectively. The estimated physical properties of MGS pulp hand-sheets were 24.88 (±3.09) N m g-1 as the tensile index, 0.92 (±0.06) kPa m2 g-1 as the burst index and 4.0 (±0.37) mN m2 g-1 as the tear index. Overall the current work demonstrated effective use of hydrodynamic cavitation for improving the processing in pulp and paper manufacturing.

Chemical Engineering Department Institute of Chemical Technology Mumbai 400019 India

Innovation Center University of Sopron 4 Bajcsy Zs 9400 Sopron Hungary

Innovation Center University of Sopron 4 Bajcsy Zs 9400 Sopron Hungary; Department of Wood Science and Technology Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology Mendel University in Brno Zemědělská 3 Brno 61300 Czech Republic

Institute of Cellulose and Paper Technology Celltech paper Ltd 9400 Sopron Hungary

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