| The main concern in the newsprint industry is the production of good quality paper for printing purposes. The sheet must have two important properties: an adequate mechanical resistance to ensure the effective operation of the presses (paper runnability) and a suitable surface for printing (printability). In this work, we were primarily interested in the first property and specifically focused on the study of the parameters causing variations in the tensile index.;It was found that the composition of the pulp feedstock is the most influent factor on the tensile index in the machine direction (MD). A higher MD tensile index is obtained by increasing the thermomechanical pulp fraction, whereas an increase in the fraction of deinked pulp produces the opposite effect.;Finally, in this work, the hierarchical blocking method combined with PLS models was applied for the first time in a pulp and paper context. This method was efficient and simple to identify and to quantify the influence of each process operation with respect to the chosen response variable. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).;For this purpose, data from an integrated newsprint mill was recovered to be analyzed. The database used comprised information about wood furnish properties, refining operation, pulp quality, paper machine operation and paper quality. |
