BTG Duroblade: a turnkey solution to boost your profitability
BTG takes a holistic approach to improving its customers’ bottom line through a full range of tailored blade and rod solutions, state-of-the-art instruments for complex process analysis, and world-class supply chain logistics.
BTG Duroblade® is renowned industry-wide for its comprehensive range of coating blade types spanning ceramics, cermets, elastomers, post-treatments and customized designs. What’s less well-known, perhaps, is that three years ago BTG also began offering an extensive package of rods and beds, through IPI Durorod™.
The BTG Durorod portfolio consists of both smooth and grooved chrome-plated and ceramic rods available in all lengths and diameters, rod beds suitable for all types of machines, as well as a vast range of accessories.
By combining this with our field engineers’ unrivalled hands-on experience in metering applications with both blades and rods, BTG offers turnkey solutions to customers looking to raise their productivity while cutting their costs.
A combination of Duroblade and Durorod products can reduce broke by as much as 80%, translating into thousands of Euros of savings every month – a major advantage in today’s tough economic climate.
A Duroblade for every coating application
As papermaking applications become more diverse and product types and qualities multiply, BTG continues to innovate to develop blade solutions that deliver top performance under a wide range of different conditions. Customized blade tip designs, and specific blade behaviors that perfectly compliment each specific process, are allowing mills to increase their profit margins and output speeds, thanks to less reject paper and few web breaks.
One of BTG’s Asian customers found that by using an optimized grooved chrome Durorod, an increased solids content of 3% in the pre-coat, and a Duroblade Super-Omega™ blade for the topcoat, it was able to reduce the number of streaks by as much as 50% on light grade and 90% on heavy grade paper - for monthly savings of up to EUR 70,000. The mill has also been able to shrink its carbon footprint by reducing the energy required for drying and broke recycling.
For board applications, an excellent example is the use of Duroblade-XXL™ on the pre-coat station, and Duroblade-Silkoat™ on the topcoat station. This dual-approach makes perfect sense when one considers that coating color formulation, abrasive conditions and rheological behavior on these two stations are drastically different, leading to different wear conditions, wear patterns and coating color flow under the blade tip. Thanks to an in-depth understanding of the typical differences in surface tension of the coating, BTG developed new blade materials that specifically reduce chemical interaction between the blade and the coating color components, to optimize wear rate and topology.
And because control of coatweight and fiber coverage are also affected by slight differences in paper temperature and moisture profile from one coating head to another, BTG took the innovative approach of customizing the blade tip shape and material according to each and every application.
For example, on specific board applications where outstanding fiber coverage is required, BTG Duroblade offers Duroblade Soft-Tip™, a unique blade capable of following the contour of the fibers. This blade’s elastomer tip has the ability to deform in a way that increases coating color coverage while limiting penetration of the base sheet. The result: a virtual absence of mottling that could spoil output quality.
Figure 1: Duroblade Soft-tip (right) – virtually no mottle
For fine paper applications, BTG’s Duroblade-Omega™ can dramatically reduce streaking, for major savings in time and money. One BTG customer, who regularly trashed 400 tons of fine paper every month because of intermittent scratches on the paper surface, was in the habit of changing his metallic tungsten blades every 20 hours to try to limit the problem. A move to Duroblade-Omega™ immediately enabled the mill to cut waste due to streaks by 30% – for savings of €70,000 every month.
Figure 2: Duroblade-Omega reduces streaks and scratches
In the popular Light Weight Coated market, Duroblade also offers huge advantages. In a segment characterized by a wide variation in grades and furnishes, which are generally composed of 50-70% mechanical pulp, ground wood pulp or thermo-mechanical pulp, understanding coating color rheological behavior and the interrelation between base and color dewatering have challenged most blade suppliers. BTG’s two specific blade solutions – Duroblade-Energy™ and Duroblade-Phoenix™, offer instant return on investment for LWC producers, through substantially longer lifetimes, very short machine run-in times, and excellent coatweight distribution properties.
The ability to control coatweight at lower pressures compared with ordinary steel blades also brings other advantages: a 2-3% increase in solids content, which translates into reduced energy costs in the drying section, and a reduced risk of breaks at the coater.
Because of a unique ceramic blade tip material, Duroblade-Energy™ can run on the fastest on-line coaters with no limitations when it comes to dry friction at start-up, web breaks or machine stops. And ultra-wear-resistance means Duroblade-Energy™ delivers better edge performance, lasting up to three times as long as standard steel blades.
Figure 3: Duroblade-Energy – no dry friction problems, better edge performance
The overall result: higher productivity, fewer blade changes, and better quality, with an increase of 5-10% in gloss, a reduction to 10% in PPS value, and Heliotest improvements in the order of 10-20%.
The holistic approach to tissue troubles
Far from being just a doctor blade supplier to the tissue industry, BTG is focusing efforts on supplying integrated solutions that quickly improve TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).
In the fast-growing tissue sector, manufacturers around the world report a host of common problems:
- Unstable coating and release properties, leading to unstable sheet quality
- Blade life reduction through unstable dewatering in the forming section
- Tons of fibers wasted daily through inefficient fiber recovery
- Steadily mounting chemical consumption to achieve desired tissue properties, cutting into profitability and leading to machine instability, increased breaks and reduced efficiency.
Many of these issues can be traced back to variations in the quality of incoming raw material, process upsets in stock preparation, and uncontrolled dosages of process and functional additives.
But while the benefits of stringent control strategies for both stock preparation and wet end are well-known and widely adopted in segments like coated fine paper and DIP-containing grades, control solutions using advanced instrumentation are still not routinely applied in tissue production, despite their well-known impact on the heart of the process – Yankee performance.
In today’s highly competitive tissue markets, consumers expect products of the very highest quality. For manufacturers, the properties that characterize a top-quality product are achieved through a well-designed creping process and cost-intensive chemical additives. But adjustments are frequently made during the production process that fail to take into account the role played by factors such as the variability of de-inked fiber quality, grade-specific bleaching chemistry, and uncontrolled fines or ash management - to mention but a few.
BTG’s experience shows that real productivity and cost improvements come from taking a holistic approach. Combining creping expertise with a thorough understanding of wet end chemistry can result in dramatic savings in time and money across the entire tissue process.
The ‘green’ solution to boosting productivity
A 2-head, 4-meter-wide coater machine running with standard 0.457 caliper steel blades with an average lifetime of 6 hours will consume around 4.3 tons of steel per year. Running the same machine with long-life Duroblade, with an average lifetime of 24 hours, will consume only 1 ton of steel per year – a 75% reduction, translating into savings of more than 2 tons of CO2 every year.
It’s well-known among leading paper manufacturers that using BTG’s high-performance blades allows for substantial increases in coating color solids content. What’s less well-known is that increased solids content also translates into substantial savings on energy consumption.
For example, increasing coating color solids content by just 2% on a 4-meter machine running at 1,200m/min on a grammage of 100gsm cuts steam consumption by 2.2 tons/hour. And that lower drying energy requirement means considerably less CO2 released into the atmosphere.
But that’s not all. Higher coating solids content also allows manufacturers to get the same quality results using lighter base paper, which means using less fiber. With the focus now firmly on sustainable production and business practices, that doesn’t just mean important cost savings on expensive fibers, it means saving trees as well. Fiber supply is not inexhaustible – indeed, it’s already becoming a problem in some areas. So Duroblade offers the chance of saving not only money, but Mother Nature’s resources, too.
Service you can count on, worldwide
BTG complements the many benefits of using Duroblade and Durorod products with a state-of-art logistics network that works around the clock to ensure our customers’ mills never run out of supplies. With more than 4,500 shipments and over 650 tons of products dispatched every year, BTG Duroblade prides itself on a highly efficient supply chain operation that you can rely on, wherever you are in the world.