New Wet-end Starch for Paper Making

Abstract

Wet-end starch is widely used for dry strength and drainage improvement, increase fines/ash retention and sizing agent retention etc. Starch is an excellent wet-end agent that can play multiple roles.Cationic wet-end starches are widely used and amphoteric starches which introduce cationic groups and anionic groups are also used for wet-end. Amphoteric starches have better drainage and fines/ash retention than cationic starches. But we have not utilized the potential functions of amphoteric starches yet.Then we made R&D efforts to utilize potential functions of amphoteric starches. We tried to find most suitable quantity of both cationic and anionic groups. Also we tried to find ion balances and uniformity of ionic distribution in molecules.As a result of our efforts, we have developed an amphoteric starch which best utilizes its functions. Although our starch is corn based, it has the same strength as potato or tapioca based cationic starches.