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Industrial machine used in the pulp and paper industry

A paper machine (or paper making machine) is an industrial machine which is used in the pulp and paper industry
to create paper in large quantities at high speed. Modern paper making machines are based on the principles of the Fourdrinier Machine, which uses a moving woven mesh to create a continuous paper web by filtering out the fibres held in a paper stock and producing a continuously moving wet mat of fibre. This is dried in the machine to produce a strong paper web. The basic process is an industrialised version of the historical process of hand paper making, which could not satisfy the demands of developing modern society for large quantities of a printing and writing substrate. The first modern paper machine was invented by Louis Nicolas Robert in France in 1799, and an improved version patented in Britain by Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier in 1806. The same process is used to produce paperboard on a paperboard machine.

Before the invention of continuous paper making, paper was made in individual sheets by stirring a container of pulp slurry and either pouring it into a fabric sieve called a sheet mould or dipping and lifting the sheet mould from the vat. While still on the fabric in the sheet mould, the wet paper was pressed to remove excess water. The sheet was then lifted off to be hung over a rope or wooden rod to air dry.

In 1799, Louis Nicolas Robert of Essonnes, France, was granted a patent for a continuous paper making machine. At the time, Robert was working for Saint Léger Didot, with whom he quarreled over the ownership of the invention. Didot believed that England was a better place to develop the machine but due to the turbulence of the French Revolution, he could not go there himself, so he sent his brother in law, John Gamble, an Englishman living in Paris. Through a chain of acquaintances, Gamble was introduced to the brothers Sealy and Henry Fourdrinier, stationers of London, who agreed to finance the project. Gamble was granted British patent 2487 on October 20, 1801. The Fourdrinier machine used a specially woven fabric mesh conveyor belt (known as a wire, as it was once woven from bronze) in the forming section, where a slurry of fibre (usually wood or other vegetable fibres) is drained to create a continuous paper web. The original Fourdrinier forming section used a horizontal drainage area, referred to as the drainage table. With the help of Bryan Donkin, a skilled and ingenious mechanic, an improved version of the Robert original was installed at Frogmore Paper Mill, Apsley, Hertfordshire, in 1803, followed by another in 1804. A third machine was installed at the Fourdriniers' own mill at Two Waters. The Fourdriniers also bought a mill at St Neots intending to install two machines there, and the process and machines continued to develop. Close to Frogmore Mill in Apsley, John Dickinson designed and built an alternate machine type; a Cylinder Mould Machine in 1809. Thomas Gilpin is most often credited for creating the first U. S. cylinder type papermaking machine at Brandywine Creek, Delaware in 1817. This machine was a cylinder mould machine. The Fourdrinier machine wasn't introduced into the USA until 1827.

Records show Charles Kinsey of Paterson, NJ had already patented a continuous process papermaking machine in 1807. Kinsey's machine was built locally by Daniel Sawn and by 1809 the Kinsey machine was successfully making paper at the Essex Mill in Paterson. Financial stress and potential opportunities created by the Embargo of 1807 eventually persuaded Kinsey and his backers to change the mill's focus from paper to cotton and Kinsey's early papermaking successes were soon overlooked and forgotten. Gilpin's 1817 patent was similar to Kinsey's, as was the John Ames patent of 1822. The Ames patent was challenged by his competitors, asserting that Kinsey was the original inventor and Ames had been stealing other people's ideas, their evidence being the employment of Daniel Sawn to work on his machine.

The plant fibres used for pulp are composed mostly of cellulose and hemi cellulose, which have a tendency to form molecular linkages between fibres in the presence of water. After the water evaporates the fibres remain bonded. It is not necessary to add additional binders for most paper grades, although both wet and dry strength additives may be added. Rags of cotton and linen were the major source of pulp for paper before wood pulp. Today almost all pulp is of wood fibre. Cotton fibre is used in speciality grades, usually in printing paper for such things as resumes and currency. Sources of rags often appear as waste from other manufacturing such as denim fragments or glove cuts. Fibres from clothing come from the cotton boll. The fibres can range from 3 to 7 cm in length as they exist in the cotton field. Bleach and other chemicals remove the colour from the fabric in a process of cooking, usually with steam. The cloth fragments mechanically abrade into fibres, and the fibres get shortened to a length appropriate for manufacturing paper with a cutting process. Rags and water dump into a trough forming a closed loop. A cylinder with cutting edges, or knives, and a knife bed is part of the loop. The spinning cylinder pushes the contents of the trough around repeatedly. As it lowers slowly over a period of hours, it breaks the rags up into fibres, and cuts the fibres to the desired length. The cutting process terminates when the mix has passed the cylinder enough times at the programmed final clearance of the knives and bed. Another source of cotton fibre comes from the cotton ginning process. The seeds remain, surrounded by short fibres known as linters for their short length and resemblance to lint. Linters are too short for successful use in fabric. Linters removed from the cotton seeds are available as first and second cuts. The first cuts are longer. The two major classifications of pulp are chemical and mechanical. Chemical pulps formerly used a sulphite process, but the kraft process is now predominant. Kraft pulp has superior strength to sulphite and mechanical pulps and kraft process spent pulping chemicals are easier to recover and regenerate. Both chemical pulps and mechanical pulps may be bleached to a high brightness. Chemical pulping dissolves the lignin that bonds fibres to one another, and binds the outer fibrils that compose individual fibres to the fibre core. Lignin, like most other substances that can separate fibres from one another, acts as a debonding agent, lowering strength. Strength also depends on maintaining long cellulose molecule chains. The kraft process, due to the alkali and sulphur compounds used, tends to minimize attack on the cellulose and the non crystalline hemicellulose, which promotes bonding, while dissolving the lignin. Acidic pulping processes shorten the cellulose chains. Kraft pulp makes superior linerboard and excellent printing and writing papers. Groundwood, the main ingredient used in newsprint and a principal component of magazine papers (coated publications), is literally ground wood produced by a grinder. Therefore, it contains a lot of lignin, which lowers its strength. The grinding produces very short fibres that drain slowly. Thermomechanical pulp (TMP) is a variation of groundwood where fibres are separated mechanically while at high enough temperatures to soften the lignin. Between chemical and mechanical pulps there are semi chemical pulps that use a mild chemical treatment followed by refining. Semi chemical pulp is often used for corrugating medium. Bales of recycled paper (normally old corrugated containers) for unbleached (brown) packaging grades may be simply pulped, screened and cleaned. Recycling to make white papers is usually done in a deinking plant, which employs screening, cleaning, washing, bleaching and flotation. Deinked pulp is used in printing and writing papers and in tissue, napkins and paper towels. It is often blended with virgin pulp. At integrated pulp and paper mills, pulp is usually stored in high density towers before being pumped to stock preparation. Non integrated mills use either dry pulp or wet lap (pressed) pulp, usually received in bales. The pulp bales are slushed in a [re]pulper.

There are four main sections on this paper machine. The forming section makes the pulp into the basis of for sheets along the wire. The press section, which removes much of the remaining water via a system of nips formed by rolls pressing against each other aided by press felts that support the sheet and absorb the pressed water. The dryer section of the paper machine, as its name suggests, dries the paper by way of a series of internally steam heated cylinders that evaporate the moisture. Calenders are used to make the paper surface extra smooth and glossy. In practice calender rolls are normally placed vertically in a stack.

From the machine chest stock is pumped to a head tank, commonly called a "head tank" or stuff box, whose purpose is to maintain a constant head (pressure) on the fiber slurry or stock as it feeds the basis weight valve. The stuff box also provides a means allowing air bubbles to escape. The consistency of the pulp slurry at the stuff box is in the 3% range. Flow from the stuff box is by gravity and is controlled by the basis weight valve on its way to the fan pump suction where it is injected into the main flow of water to the fan pump. The main flow of water pumped by the fan pump is from a whitewater chest or tank that collects all the water drained from the forming section of the paper machine. Before the fiber stream from the stuff box is introduced, the whitewater is very low in fiber content. The whitewater is constantly recirculated by the fan pump through the headbox and recollected from the wire pit and various other tanks and chests that receive drainage from the forming wire and vacuum assisted drainage from suction boxes and wet fiber web handling rolls. On the way to the head box the pulp slurry may pass through centrifugal cleaners, which remove heavy contaminants like sand, and screens, which break up fibre clumps and remove oversized debris. The fan pump ultimately feeds the headbox, whether or not any centrifugal cleaners or screens are present. The purpose of the headbox is to create turbulence in order to keep the fibers from clumping together and to uniformly distribute the slurry across the width of the wire. Wood fibers have a tendency to attract one another, forming clumps, the effect being called flocculation. Flocculation is lessened by lowering consistency and or by agitating the slurry; however, de flocculation becomes very difficult at much above 0.5% consistency. Minimizing the degree of flocculation when forming is important to physical properties of paper. There are also machines with entire Fourdrinier sections mounted above a traditional Fourdrinier. This allows making multi layer paper with special characteristics. These are called top Fourdriniers and they make multi ply paper or paperboard. Commonly this is used for making a top layer of bleached fibre to go over an unbleached layer. Another type forming section is the cylinder mould machine invented by John Dickinson in 1809, originally as a competitor to the Fourdrinier machine. This machine uses a mesh covered rotating cylinder partially immersed in a tank of fibre slurry in the wet end to form a paper web, giving a more random distribution of the cellulose fibres. Cylinder machines can form a sheet at higher consistency, which gives a more three dimensional fibre orientation than lower consistencies, resulting in higher caliper (thickness) and more stiffness in the machine direction (MD). High MD stiffness is useful in food packaging like cereal boxes and other boxes like dry laundry detergent. Tissue machines typically form the paper web between a wire and a special fabric (felt) as they wrap around a forming roll. The web is pressed from the felt directly onto a large diameter dryer called a yankee. The paper sticks to the yankee dryer and is peeled off with a scraping blade called a doctor. Tissue machines operate at speeds of up to 2000 m/min.

The second section of the paper machine is the press section, which removes much of the remaining water via a system of nips formed by rolls pressing against each other aided by press felts that support the sheet and absorb the pressed water. The paper web consistency leaving the press section can be above 40%. Pressing is the second most efficient method of de watering the sheet (behind free drainage in the forming section) as only mechanical action is required. The number of press rolls, their arrangement and the arrangement and type of felts used are influenced by the grades of paper being produced and the desired operational characteristics of the machine. Press felts historically were made from wool. However, today they are nearly 100% synthetic. They are made up of a polyamide woven fabric with thick batt applied in a specific design to maximise water absorption. Presses can be single or double felted. A single felted press has a felt on one side and a smooth roll on the other. A double felted press has both sides of the sheet in contact with a press felt. Single felted nips are useful when mated against a smooth roll (usually in the top position), which adds a two sidedness—making the top side appear smoother than the bottom. Double felted nips impart roughness on both sides of the sheet. Double felted presses are desirable for the first press section of heavy paperboard. Simple press rolls can be rolls with grooved or blind drilled surface. More advanced press rolls are suction rolls. These are rolls with perforated shell and cover. The shell made of metal material such as bronze or stainless steel is covered with rubber or a synthetic material. Both shell and cover are drilled throughout the surface. A stationary suction box is fitted in the core of the suction roll to support the shell being pressed. End face mechanical seals are used for the interface between the inside surface of the shell and the suction box. For the smooth rolls, they are typically made of granite rolls. The granite rolls can be up to 30 feet (9 m) long and 6 feet (2 m) in diameter. Conventional roll presses are configured with one of the press rolls is in a fixed position, with a mating roll being loaded against this fixed roll. The felts run through the nips of the press rolls and continues around a felt run, normally consisting of several felt rolls. During the dwell time in the nip, the moisture from the sheet is transferred to the press felt. When the press felt exits the nip and continues around, a vacuum box known as an Uhle Box applies vacuum (normally 60 kPa) to the press felt to remove the moisture so that when the felt returns to the nip on the next cycle, it does not add moisture to the sheet. Some grades of paper use suction pick up rolls that use vacuum to transfer the sheet from the couch to a lead in felt on the first press or between press sections. Pickup roll presses normally have a vacuum box that has two vacuum zones (low vacuum and high vacuum). These rolls have a large number of drilled holes in the cover to allow the vacuum to pass from the stationary vacuum box through the rotating roll covering. The low vacuum zone picks up the sheet and transfers, while the high vacuum zone attempts to remove moisture. Unfortunately, at high enough speed centrifugal force flings out vacuumed water, making this less effective for dewatering. Pickup presses also have standard felt runs with Uhle boxes. However, pickup press design is quite different, as air movement is important for the pickup and dewatering facets of its role. Crown Controlled Rolls (also known as CC Rolls) are usually the mating roll in a press arrangement. They have hydraulic cylinders in the press rolls that ensure that the roll does not bow. The cylinders connect to a shoe or multiple shoes to keep the crown on the roll flat, to counteract the natural "bend" in the roll shape due to applying load to the edges. Extended Nip Presses (or ENP) are a relatively modern alternative to conventional roll presses. The top roll is usually a standard roll, while the bottom roll is actually a large CC roll with an extended shoe curved to the shape of the top roll, surrounded by a rotating rubber belt rather than a standard roll cover. The goal of the ENP is to extend the dwell time of the sheet between the two rolls thereby maximising the de watering. Compared to a standard roll press that achieves up to 35% solids after pressing, an ENP brings this up to 45% and higher—delivering significant steam savings or speed increases. ENPs densify the sheet, thus increasing tensile strength and some other physical properties.

The dryer section of the paper machine, as its name suggests, dries the paper by way of a series of internally steam heated cylinders that evaporate the moisture. Steam pressures may range up to 160 psig. Steam enters the end of the dryer head (cylinder cap) through a steam joint and condensate exits through a siphon that goes from the internal shell to a centre pipe. From the centre pipe the condensate exits through a joint on the dryer head. Wide machines require multiple siphons. In faster machines, centrifugal force holds the condensate layer still against the shell and turbulence generating bars are typically used to agitate the condensate layer and improve heat transfer. for two primary reasons, to avoid iron contamination of the product and their corrosion resistance to the various chemicals used in the paper making process. Type 316 stainless steel is a common material used in paper machines.