Towards automated manipulation and characterisation of paper-making fibres and its components

Papermaking has a long history and is dominated by experience. The understanding of structure and ultrastructure and their formation mechanisms is fundamental but far from complete. Experiments and tests are performed to unveil the ultrastructure and find out more about fibre properties and the fibre-fibre and fibril-fibre connection establishment during paper-making. The following pages are dealing with the development and evaluation of novel systems and methodologies addressing this topic. The work was performed in a joint workshop organised between the University of Oldenburg, VTT, Grenoble-INP/PAGORA and Tampere University of Technology. Adopting nanomanipulation techniques used to handle and assemble individual carbon nano tubes (CNT) is a promising approach. Although organic material behaves differently than the more organised inorganic structures like CNTs, the existing systems and techniques are good starting points. Three different systems were used during the workshop at the University of Oldenburg. One of these systems was developed from scratch for this workshop. It is a modular micro/nanomanipulation system offering a high flexibility in manipulations. After introducing these systems, different manipulation techniques are performed and presented. The gained experiences were used to perform a number of preparing steps and characterisation experiments which are not yet available in larger scale applications in the presented resolution, e.g. the compression testing of single fibres with force feedback. Also other techniques as for example focused ion beam cutting and deposition on single fibres were performed. All presented material was used to evaluate existing systems and to create recommendations for future systems.