The strengthening of paper

The parylene process and the graft copolymerization method have been developed for strengthening paper that is already fragile and brittle, at which point deacidification is largely ineffective. These techniques also provide an alternative to deacidification, for which long term problems have been discovered. The parylene process involves the deposition of a thin film over all the pages, uniform on a single sheet and denser on the edges of a book. The graph copolymerization involves initiation, propagation and termination in a free radical polymerization reaction.