AIC's 45th Annual Meeting

It has been estimated that one third of the paper materials in libraries are too brittle to handle. The structure of a typical paper sheet is comprised of semi-rigid cellulose fibers.  These cellulose fibers are more than ten times longer than the sheet thickness and can be considered a two dimensional random fiber network. The main pathways of paper degradation, acid-catalyzed hydrolysis and oxidation, cause depolymerization of the cellulose chains and breaking of the intrafiber bonds, directly impacting the paper's physical properties.  Conventional mechanical measurements of aged paper are destructive and often too severe to understand the true extent of deterioration.  We have compared the reproducibility and results of the rolling test, fold endurance test, tensile tests and have developed a new test, the JHU bend test.  The goal of these tests is to measure the strengths of naturally aged papers with varying amounts of brittleness. Through this comparison and the use of mathematical modeling developed by the JHU Department of Physics and Astronomy we show the limits of each test and relate the state of paper degradation to test results.