Mechanisms of Flocculation of Microcrystalline Cellulose by Poly(ethylene oxide) and Cofactor Corilagin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO), a widely known flocculation agent used primarily as a fines retention aid in mechanical grade papers, has its efficiency enhanced by various compounds, known as cofactors. These cofactors form a complex with PEO, which acts as an efficient bridging agent for fines flocculation. The nature of the PEO/cofactor complex is mainly unknown, and it was originally believed that the association was driven by hydrogen bonding. Therefore it was decided to investigate the complex formation in more detail. As a model system we studied PEO and a model cofactor, corilagin, a precursor of tannic acid, a known cofactor for PEO. We performed both Semi-Empirical Molecular Orbital (PM3) gas phase calculations and Molecular Dynamics (MD) calculations in the presence of water. Both methods lead to the same surprising conclusion: no association between PEO and corilagin occurs at room temperature. The reason is that the gain of association enthalpy is not large enough to overcome the loss in entropy. No correlation was found between the association enthalpy and the number of hydrogen bonds between PEO and corilagin. The absence of PEO/corilagin complexation was confirmed by NMR, isothermal titration calorimetry and the inability of PEO/corilagin to flocculate MCC (microcrystalline cellulose). In the presence of low concentrations of salt, complexation and MCC flocculation was observed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".