Field Experiences with A New High Air Rate Flotator, 1994 Recycling Symposium Proceedings

Mark W. Gilkey, Peter Seifert, Thomas 0. Conte

Deink flotation with higher than conven-ional air addition rates has been discussed in the literature, and is also being applied in a first few commercial installations.

This paper presents commercial flotation start-up results of cells with exception-ally high rate of air addition, for news-to-news deinking. It also reports field data about side-by-side comparisons with conventional equipment.

In the new flotation supplied by a blower process, air is and dispersed by a mechanical dispersion device. A technical solution has been found to handle volumet-ric air flow rates up to ten times higher than the stock flow rate! in a single flotation stage, representing an increase by a factor of four to eight over conventional multi-stage systems. The extra power requirements for the blower and the disperser are of the same order of magnitude as the overall power requirement of conventional cells.

Data show excellent performance of high air rate flotators in terms of brightness gain, dirt count reduction, and reject rate.