BTG Duroblade: committed to boosting your productivity
BTG pioneered the world’s first high-performance long-life blade. Now, with specialist applications and competitive pressures making new demands on mills, BTG continues to seek innovative ways of helping customers cut costs and improve quality.
At BTG Duroblade, we focus all our development and improvement projects around the real-life performance demands, pain points and special requests of our customers.
In the metering coating blade segment, our latest products – Duroblade-XXL, Silkoat, Phoenix, Energy and Omega – were all developed to answer specific customer needs, such as gloss improvement, edge wear reduction and ways of countering problems with streaks.
At the same time, we’re committed to helping our customers reduce their Total Cost of Operation (TCO) through products that allow for the use of cheaper raw materials without any drop in final coated paper surface quality.
Since the blade tip is the last point of contact with the paper before the drying section, its influence on final coated paper surface quality cannot be overstated.
In board production, for instance, the use of Duroblade-Silkoat on the topcoat position instead of a standard ceramic blade can decrease PPS down to 50% while increasing gloss by up to five points. And even if enhancing final coated paper surface quality isn’t a priority, choosing Silkoat over standard ceramic frequently allows mills to use coarser, less expensive pigments while maintaining equivalent PPS and gloss levels. For even modest-sized mills, the reduction in raw material costs alone can amount to savings in the order of hundreds of thousands of euros.
The use of high-performance long-life blades on LWC grades is another area where mills can realize substantial TCO savings. Choosing Duroblade-Energy over standard steel blades allows for an increase in solids content of up to 5% while delivering improved final coated paper surface quality. With energy costs soaring in the wake of global market volatility, the potential savings are dramatic, ensuring very fast ROI.
A comprehensive portfolio geared to your needs
Figure 1:
Blade tracking software provides an instant snapshot of output quality and problems that may impact production efficiency and profitability.
Duroblade long-life high-performance blades can dramatically reduce blade change frequency, broke and lost production time.
BTG’s R&D teams may have had their hands full developing new blade types, but the quest to improve our offering and respond even more precisely to evolving market needs never ends. We’re currently working on new blade models designed to deliver PPS improvements for board and other grades, and to reduce microlines in board and heavy fine paper grades.
At the same time, we’re also strengthening our service portfolio through the development of new, more precise methods of blade analysis, to ensure our final recommendations to customers are as accurate as possible in terms of both blade geometry and machine settings.
And to ensure our customers always get the most out of their investment in Duroblade products, BTG teams are on hand to deliver specialist onsite training to coater machine operators in a wide range of local languages.
BTG’s new Blade Consumption Control Software is another innovation that’s proving very useful for customers, allowing them to track blade lifetimes as well as the reasons for and frequency of blade changes, in order to generate an accurate picture of problems and pains points (see Figure 1).
The system allows mill operators to quickly pinpoint the principal reasons for blade changes, to help optimize blade usage through a change of blade type or further improvements to operational process efficiency.
All in all, our broad portfolio of Duroblade products and services represents just one of the many ways in which BTG’s teams continue to help you boost your productivity.