Obsolete Axioms Prevent Progress, Innovations Make Superior Solutions, 2005 Papermakers Conference

Industrial papermaking evolved under a low technology era that still stains the mind of papermakers. When processes were discontinuous and control primitive ingenious solutions were required for coping with an imperfect reality.

New technologies have fundamentally changed the base for process design, but the papermakers’ culture changes more slowly. Textbooks, Teachers and Technical information papers typically focus on detail design of old solutions rather than giving a rational analyze of problems and an approach to their solution.

Trusting and applying, without prejudice, modern but well-established technologies like digital process control, consistency and flow measurement and centrifugal degassing eliminates many of the problems that needed the ingenious solutions.

The system can then be much simpler and more efficient than it used to be. This paper highlights past limitations and their consequences. In the light of more than thirty industrial references it then discusses how new technologies lead to a compact, hydraulic, airless process solution that improves stability, agility, cleanliness and efficiency of the papermaking process.