Paper Reconstituted Tobacco Product Research And Testing Technology Related To The Development

Paper-process reconstituted tobacco has played an important role and significance in reducing the cigarette tar, which could strengthen the cigarette style characteristics, improve the quality stability of cigarette products and decrease the consumption of raw materials and so on. Paper-process reconstituted tobacco has been an important and indispensable raw material of cigarette. This paper carried out a series of studies on the field:1. As a key target of technology development, the writer studied and established the casing technology system (that is the core formulation technology) of domestic RT, designed and developed a series of typical representative RT products including their casing recipes such as flue-cured tobacco type, blended type, mint type, different hygroscopicity, and so on, which had different flavor styles, characteristics, tastes and functions; According to the demands of improving their quality, more than30kinds of safe, reliable, and good effect plant extracts and additives were identified and screened for their function, casing effect and the appropriate casing amount; To preparation of RT casing liquor, Three-stage continuous countercurrent extraction process, single-double effect combined with vacuum concentrating technology, casing technology on line and efficient coating machine were developed, which had benefits of coating uniform, good liquid permeability, high coating rate. The related research achievements were transformed and applied in product lines of some RT factories both inside and outside Yunnan province.2. Based on microwave resonant cavity perturbation theory and related technology developed recently in the field of microwave metallurgy, a rapid, nondestructive detection method of moisture content in RT was expanded. It shows that the standard determination deviations of moisture are less than0.33%based on calibration models of voltage output/signal bandwidth, which conformed to the accuracy requirement of the classic oven method. Furthermore, the response speed of the detection was only0.1ms. 3. Since there were some blanks and defects in RT testing methods, some related research and detection technology development were focused on as follows:1) Based on the process method of tobacco reconstituted and the coating liquid composed mainly of hot water soluble contents, a detection method of casing rate especially for the final RT products was proposed and developed, which could be tested and expressed by D-value between hot water extraction yields of RT product and its paper-base. The research solved a long-term problem about how to test and monitor these important parameter of casing rate of the final RT product;2) According to characteristics of RT and its application in cigarette, technical indicators of RT sensory quality was studied and proposed;3) Some current detection methods such as grammage, thickness, tensile strength and bursting strength of RT were investigated and improved, and their testing conditions were also optimized.4. To contrast comprehensively domestic RT and the imported,64RT products were systematically analysed including of their physical properties, fiber morphology, chemical components, aroma substances the conventional smoking compositions, aroma, seven kinds of chemical components in mainstream smoke and its hazardous index, sensory taste quality, and so on. Their advantages and disadvantages were compared, and the correlations of all kinds of RT physicochemical indexes were studied. The research showed that there were extremely significant correlations among nine pairs of physical indicators, and20pairs of chemical indicators respectively, even as16pairs of chemical and physical indicators, nine pairs of harmful substance and chemical indicators,11pairs of sensory evaluation indicators and physicochemical indicators. The research was convinced having positive signification on revealing systematically differences and gaps between domestic and imported RT and impoving the quality of the former.5. The casing products RT developed independently by the writer were blended into cigarette, their features of cigarette primary processing and CO problem were studied. The main conclusions were as follows:1) RT developed independently had similar physical, chemical properties and sensory taste quality as the imported samples, while more suitable for Chinese-style cigarette recipe for their better taste. Application of these casing RT products in cigarette would play active roles in lowering tar and production consumption of tobacco raw materials, and regulating sensory quality of cigarette. In primary processing test, these products could passed through all the primary process, and had better performance and higher value in use than the expanded tobacco and stem;2) There was no obvious regularity between CO diffuse amount of cigarette and RT blended proportions, but good regularity between CO/Tar ratios of cigarette and the latter; CO diffuse amount of domestic and imported RT products were all high (almost equally as that of cigarette) probably for their high contents of cellulose and lignose;3) The paper proposed for the first time that CO/Tar ratio of RT product was an important parameter related closely to its utilization value in cigarette recipe; The RT product with low CO/Tar ratio and high taste quality should be continuously developed by domestic factories.