Intensification of Press Felt Dewatering for Tissue Machines

Abstract

This article describes a method of dewatering press felts using a blow-through device. The essence of this method is pressing out free water contained in the felt with unheated air at a slight overpressure. The usefulness of this method for various types of felt used in tissue machines was tested. The results showed that the effectiveness of this process depends mainly on the proper selection of the pressure difference on both sides of the dewatering felt and of the blow-through time (dwell time). The increase in the dryness of felts dewatered by means of the air blow-through method is closely related to the structure and contamination of the felt. In the second part of the study, the felts were additionally dewatered using a suction chamber with a vacuum of 20 kPa. Unfortunately, the increase in the dryness of the felts by means of a vacuum was not very high, only up to 2.8%.