Kadant Nordic, located in Huskvarna, Sweden, is home to an M-clean™ cleaning system research facility and pilot plant. Numerous process industries such as papermakers, roofing manufacturing, and food processing are faced with the challenge of keeping fabrics and roll covers clean. Contaminants are deposited and consequently forced into the void volume of fabrics, reducing permeability, creating holes in the sheet, and other runnability issues. In addition, deposits on roll surfaces cause picking or sheet marking. These deposits can come from the raw material (recycled fiber), starch, coating paste, dust, oil, and grease and are often referred to as “stickies”.
Traditional cleaning methods are often incapable of dealing effectively with such contaminants or are undesirable due to the large volume of water required. At Kadant Nordic’s research facility and pilot plant ongoing studies are being conducted to better understand the challenges presented by contaminants and how those challenges can be addressed. Working closely with customers and fabric and chemical suppliers, Kadant Nordic is optimizing existing technologies and looking for new cleaning solutions.
Each trial opportunity is defined as one fabric from the customer. Multiple tests can be executed on just one piece of fabric. For example, the fabric is divided into sections. Each section is tested with different variables. Variables may include with vacuum versus without vacuum, low water pressure versus high water pressure, and cleaning with a few spray nozzles versus many spray nozzles.
