Air-coupled ultrasonic spectroscopy applied to the study of the properties of paper produced from mineral powder (mineral paper)

A recent technology has been introduced into the paper industry that makes possible to produce paper materials by replacing the cellulose fibres by a mineral powder, achieving a more environmentally friendly product compared with conventional paper. The purpose of this work is to determine the possibilities of an air-coupled ultrasonic technique to study this kind of new materials in order to develop an ultrasonic system useful for quality control for this industry. In particular, air-coupled ultrasonic spectroscopy is specially well suited to this kind of materials because of the fact that no coupling liquid and no direct contact with the sample is employed. A through transmission technique is employed and Fourier analysis is performed to obtain both magnitude and phase spectra of the transmission coefficient. Properties in the thickness direction as well as in the paper plane are investigated. Different paper grades (from 120 to 400 g/m2) provided by Terraskin have been studied. Very high attenuation coeficientes and very low propagation velocities (and hence elastic constant) are obtained, this can be explained by considering the large porosity of this material (about 50%) and the microstrucutre: solid grains in contact with a variable amount of polymeric resin partially filling the pore space.