Last year, UPM Chapelle Darblay, France, decided to replace the existing ceramic cover on the center press roll of PM 6 with a TerraSpeed ceramic cover from Voith in order to increase machine speed by reducing the draw after the press roll.
The goal was to lower the draw by at least 10% in that position, going down from 3.6% at a machine speed of 1,500 m/min to slightly above 3.2% machine speed difference just by using a better ceramic surface on the solid center press roll. UPM chose TerraSpeed to achieve that target due to its excellent performance in numerous reference installations. After more than one year in operation, the production on Chapelle PM 6 confirms that UPM's high expectations have been exceeded. In a very stable running performance, the TerraSpeed cover shows draw values down to 3.0% constantly, leading to a considerably higher production output. These stable conditions were confirmed by monitoring the surface roughness of the ceramic cover, which almost had not changed at all since the start-up of TerraSpeed in mid 2012.
This consistency can be kept due to the excellent properties of the TerraSpeed cover, but also due to the proper doctoring with SkyTerra S blades from Voith, which were designed especially to run on TerraSpeed.
