Voith Paper, a division of German engineering company Voith, announced this year that it offers complete pulp-drying machines, from headbox to the cross cutter and bale packing, with new vertical arrangement of the rolls in the dryer section.

This patented technological advance saves energy and leads to a much higher evaporation rate, says Voith.

The goals of ensuring higher productivity and lower resource consumption were achieved. The installed former ensures that the paper web enters the dryer section with a much higher dry content. Since mechanical dewatering is less expensive than thermal dewatering, the customer is, therefore, offered a clear advantage, the company explains.

Steam consumption in the dryer section is reduced compared with conventional sections. Owing to more efficient evaporation, the temperature of the web in the dryer section has also been reduced. Another benefit of the higher evaporation rate is the reduced size of the dryer and, therefore, of the building, resulting in high energy and cost savings.

According to Voith, the installation at Brazilian pulp manufacturer Lwarcel Celulose, in Lençóis Paulista, São Paulo, demonstrates a further series of advantages of using the vertical arrangement of the dryer section.

Altogether, the vertical arrangement saves substantially more space. Lwarcel installed the vertical dryer section directly after its existing conventional dryer section, with a running drying machine.

In addition, the pulp manufacturer confirms that the vertical dryer section has an extremely practical side-effect when there is a web break.

The broken web does not build up between the rolls, but instead simply falls through the vertical arrangement. Cleaning of the dryer also only takes minutes rather than hours.

Meanwhile, Voith’s pilot machine in São Paulo illustrates the entire pulp drying process and offers customers the chance to conduct their own test runs.

In the area of pulp drying technology, Voith offers many years of experience. Since 1998, Voith’s NipcoFlex presses, consisting of two shoe presses arranged one after the other, have been installed in pulp drying machines.

The quality of Voith’s product is reflected in a high market share for the shoe presses for these machines, says the company. But, in future, Voith will no longer provide just individual components but rather the entire paper manufacturing production line.

The company says through constant new developments, Voith Paper is improving the paper manufacturing process, focusing on developing resource-saving products to reduce the use of energy, water, and fibres.