Recent supply/demand balance of woodchips has changed dramatically due to the rapid pulp production increase in China. On the demand side, China became the biggest woodchip importer surpassing Japan for the first time ever. Globally, the trade volume of woodchips was 27 million BDT（Born Dry Ton）in Asia and approximately 30 million BDT including European market. It was the largest volume in history. On the supply side, three major supply countries, Vietnam, Australia and Chile had a record export volume respectively; however, those countries have some negative issues for stable supply. Thus, it is expected the supply/demand balance in the near future will be in a tight situation. In this report, we will study the future market prospects by analyzing the demand/supply situation respectively.

In the future, the priority issues for management of industrial forest plantations will be making strategies to the increase of world population and the global warming. World demand for wood will defi nitely increase year by year due to population growth. However, competition with the demand for agricultural land will make it diffi cult to secure new lands for tree planting. For improve forest productivity, it will be necessary not only to increase growth but also to develop of tree species that overcome global warming.

The goal of industrial tree planting is to get for the maximum yield in limited lands. Sustainability in industrial forest plantations are to improve cost competitiveness in order to provide society with wood needed for the future. For that purpose, it is important to grasp accurate information.

Forest measurement technologies continue to progress year by year. Satellite data are also able to use to watch illegal loggings, forest fi res, wind damages, fl ood damages, pests and diseases. From now on, we can take information of plantation sites and forestry machines by IoT （Internet of Things）.

This time, I was given the opportunity to explain the launch of The Brazilian Tree Industry （ibá）, the creation of genetically modifi ed eucalyptus in Brazil, and the technologies in CENIBRA's tree planting business. I would like to evaluate that they are steadily moving in the direction captures the requests of the times.

In this paper I described about pulp manufacturing technologies which related to KP, MP and DIP after World War Two. These pulping technologies were mainly influenced by raw materials, environmental issue such as AOX in bleaching effluent and market needs.

A DIP production process consists of many kinds of machines. It means that there are possibilities to be able to reduce the cost of raw material, energy, and chemical by the technology of each component. In this paper, we will introduce DIP system technologies related to each component and system.

In order to modernize the existing bleaching plants at Cenibra in Brazil, a new No. 3 bleaching plant was installed with the latest bleaching technologies and state of the art washing machines; Twin Roll Press Evolution（TRPE）to replace the existing old No.1 bleaching plant. With this installation the power consumption, total steam consumption, and water consumption were reduced approximately by 49–50％, and effl uent load were reduced approximately by 38％. In addition, the consumptions of chlorine dioxide, peroxide, caustic, and sulfuric acid were reduced by about 11％, 15％, 12％, and 45％ respectively. It means that a lot of benefi ts can be obtained by adopting the latest bleaching technologies and TRPE instead of the old bleaching plant. Today it is progressing to modernize the existing No. 2 bleaching plant with latest technologies and TRPE, which scheduled to start up in December 2019, and expected to obtain same results as those achieved in the new No.3 bleaching plant.

Kraft Pulp Mill needs to install Auto Process Control system, which can achieve bleaching chemical cost reduction with operating and quality stabilization as well as workload reduction for each operator. Iwakuni Mill has two Kraft Pulp Mills, one is 5 KP with hardwood chips, and the other is 3 KP with switching operation between hardwood and softwood chips. 5 KP plant, which 1,550 t/D production is applied, controls brightness and Kappa number of final furnish by 4-stage bleaching system（A-D₀-E/P-D₁）and had an issue of excessive bleaching chemical consumption not to breach brightness quality standard.

Last year operating optimization and chemical cost reduction in 5 KP were achieved after installation of Valmet APC Bleaching Optimizer（VBO）．This report shows our experience through the process leading to stabilized operation since VBO installed.

It is well known that the PID control is very effective function. However, PID has a weakness against process’s long dead time such as pulp bleach process have. Therefore, it has been used sample PI control and Smith’s predictor etc. to avoid those problems. I summarized the development of the history of the control technology to improve the controllability against the pulp bleach process problems, for example, cascade con­ trol, pulp bleach advanced control by DCS（Distributed  Control System）, feed forward control system using multiple regression model by utilizing process computer with database system connected to the DCS and re­ cently MPC（Model  Predictive Control） systems. Furthermore, unavoidable sensor troubles in pulp bleaching process and the soft–sensor in the MPC are described. Finally, touching on the technologies of Industrial–IoT, machine learning and AI etc. using big data, we’d like to consider how these new technologies will be utilized in the pulp bleaching processes in the future.

In the paper industry, engineers who aim for stable operation and quality improvement in manufacturing, have been faced with the increasing number of pitch troubles due to sticky substances in recent years. These problems are caused by the increased utilization ratio of waste paper and plantation trees, furthermore, closed water system.

Conventional pitch control methods in the pulping process generally use microtalc, surfactants, anions and cationic polymers. They are highly effective and at low cost, however, a new countermeasure method is required because the conventional methods are not enough to meet the demands for further improvement in quality and productivity in many cases nowadays.

This article describes our approach to pitch control in the pulping process.

The purpose of brown stock washing is to separate spent cooking chemicals and dissolved organic wood solids from unbleached fibers. Recently, some pulp mills are trying to improve pulp yield, but this operation usually tends to make pulp with high blow line kappa number. Also, we need more bleaching agents or oxygen delignification efficiency than conventional operation to meet required fiber brightness. If we use water alone for this process, we cannot remove hydrophobic materials, like dissolved lignins and extractives, from unbleached fibers completely. Our pulp wash aid has dual effect; one is to improve drainage and the other is to remove wash hydrophobic materials efficiently. Using our pulp wash aid, we can reduce the amount used of wash liquor and bleaching agents, and also achieve improvement of oxygen delignification, etc. This article describes the theory of our pulp wash aid, and introduces some case studies from actual mills in overseas.

Sumitomo Evaporator is a plate type falling fi lm evaporator. The biggest feature of it is excellent solution for scale trouble. For its feature, Sumitomo Evaporator has been applied to Black Liquor Concentration since 1974 in Japan. In This Paper, We introduce Sumitomo evaporator and its other features. Then, we will show how to check the state of multiple eff ect evaporators from the point of view of temperature conditions.

In this paper, we report on the wear of refractories in rotary kilns and their factors by showing two examples. The wear of refractories in the rotary kiln includes corrosion, spalling and abrasion caused by various factors. In case of a rotary kiln, mechanical spalling due to mechanical stress can be a serious problem. By identifying the causes of wear of refractories and conducting proper measures, it is possible to prevent refractories from being prematurely worn and to increase the operation rate of the kiln.

The utilization of recovered paper has been increased signifi cantly in these thirty years. China has been a major importer of waste paper. Around half of internationally traded waste paper have been imported by China in recent year. In 2017, China announced the tighter control of import of recyclable waste would be in­ troduced from the end of 2017. Regarding paper, China has prohibited importing other waste papers, includ­ ing mixture of various waste papers, which is not classifi ed in other trade code. The reasons behind the trade restriction is pollution from paper recycling and mixture of non–recyclable waste.

EU and US increased the export of waste papers to India in 2018, while Japan did not. The reason why Japan did not increase the export of waste papers to India might be transportation cost. From east coast of US and EU, India is closer than China. But from Japan, the transportation cost to India is signifi cantly high, compared with China.

This paper reviews the recent trade fl ow of waste papers in recent years, and Chinese regulation on waste paper import.

In recent years, demand for paper has been sluggish, each paper company is making efforts to improve productivity and reduce costs to improve profitability. Even in the kraft pulp making process, it is necessary to use inhomogeneous raw materials, operation with chemicals and energy conservation, and various problems accompanying it are becoming obvious.

Regarding the pitch component in the raw material, it was possible to reduce the solvent extraction amount and dirt number by removing fatty acid and resin acid of the pulp by the newly developed pitch con trol agent. Regarding to the pitch component derived from the antifoaming agent, it was possible to signifi cantly reduce the dirt number by developing an antifoaming agent with excellent dispersibility. Regarding the whiteness of the pulp, it could be improved with a pulp cleaning agent which removes lignin and prevents re attachment. As for the calcium oxalate scale, we optimized the scale inhibitor to enhance the performance un der high pH and drastically extended the continuous operation period in the actual machine.

We would like to contribute to the paper making industry by solving our customers’ problems and im proving productivity and ensuring stable operation through our chemical treatment technologies including these examples.

Many prototypes and experiments are repeated in order to decide the specification of the optimum corrugated fiberboard box, so if it is possible to predict the compressive strength of the box in advance, the development period can be shortened. Therefore, a method of predicting compressive strength of corrugated fiberboard boxes using nonlinear finite element analysis was studied. Considering geometric nonlinearity and material nonlinearity, phenomena leading to the maximum of the load through bifurcation buckling, initial yielding and material failure were reproduced. As the material properties, the order of the buckling mode and the box compressive strength matched the experimental results by inputting the data of the stressstrain curve obtained by the edgewise crush test of the corrugated fiberboard and the rotational rigidity around the crease line axis. As factors influencing the box compressive strength, it is conceivable that the edgewise crush resistance of the corrugated fiberboard, the bending rigidity of the box corner part, the buckling mode, and the shape of the box. It was proved that estimation of the box compressive strength by numerical simulation is effective as a means to realize optimum design of the box specification and shortening the turnaround time of new product development.