How is cardboard manufactured?

How Cardboard is Manufactured

They make cardboard out of outer flat sheets (liners) of puncture resistant paper, sandwiching a central "filling" (fluting, so called because it's fluted) of corrugated short fibre paper. The paper used for the fluting may also be "Semi-Chem", so called because chemicals are used to "stretch" the fibres, making it stronger and stiffer. The paper used to make the "fluting" is generally paper that weighs in around the 90 grammes per square metre (gsm) mark, although it is not uncommon to use "Semi Chem", that may weigh up to 171 gsm. Because "semi chem" is tougher and drier than your average waste based fluting, there is generally a lot of steam and heat applied in the actual corrugating machine. For normal fluting paper, only a small amount of heat, and no steam would be applied. Then, the "bottom-liner" and "medium" (outer and inner portion of the final corrugated board product, which may not necessarily be brown, they can be white, or "mottled") are glued together along the outsides of the peaks and valleys of each flute, normally using starch adhesives. There are endless possibilities to finish, length and width of the board being produced. The width is only dictated by the width of the machine bed, which may be anything up to 3.5 metres (around 11 feet) wide. The length is generally dictated by the length of the "dry end" of the machine, but I personally have seen board being cut up to 4 metres long, and as short as 600 millimetres. I hope that makes things a little clearer for my fellow "Wiki-ers".

First answer by ID0213115529. Last edit by Clampchamp. Contributor trust: 0 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 29 [recommend question].