Powerful results in a beautiful location

Cartiere del Garda paper mill is located in the small town of Riva del Garda in the beautiful area around Lake Garda.

Cartiere del Garda overtook 50% energy savings after replacing IR drying with air drying

Mill Production Manager Antonio Di Blas says: “We got it all - 50% gas savings, better paper quality, better working conditions, better availability, and smaller maintenance costs. Valmet* impressed us with its technical knowledge and with this exceptional dryer.”

Cartiere del Garda paper mill is part of Lecta Group and is located in the small town of Riva del Garda, a beautiful area near Lake Garda in northern Italy. One might be moved to say it is the most beautiful paper mill location in the world. As an integral part of this breathtaking scenery, the mill’s targets are to continuously improve its environmental performance and lower production costs. One step towards achieving these targets was replacing its gas heated infra red dryer with a PowerDry air dryer after the gate roll coating station. Valmet guaranteed 48% energy savings compared with the existing infra red dryers, and with other benefits such as lower maintenance costs for the dryer and the equipment around the dryer; the payback time for the rebuild is around one year.

After having learned about the energy efficiency of the Valmet high intensity air dryer and being convinced they would achieve at least the same end product quality as with infra red dryers, they were quick to put the new dryer into action. Coating Technical Manager Vittorio D’Olif says: “Every goal of this rebuild was achieved. Gas consumption decreased by 50%, even though we increased our production speed by more than 10%, paper quality is better due to no picking and no stripes, and the working environment around the dryer is much cooler. This dryer is also very operator friendly and easy to use and adjust.”

At the Garda mill drying energy consumption with the PowerDry air dryer decreased by 50% even though production speed increased.

Cartiere del Garda produces high quality coated woodfree paper for publishing and advertising work. The top coated grade weight of the paper varies from 90 to 400 g/m2. The mill has two paper machines and two coating machines. The new PowerDry air dryer was installed in PM 2, which has an on-line coating machine with a web width at the reel of 3,350 mm and the production speed varies between 300 and 800 m/min. High end product quality and the environmental performance of the production process are top priorities for the mill.

The PowerDry air dryer is an efficient dryer suitable for all coating drying with gas or steam heating. The new PowerDry air dryer at the Riva del Garda mill has a high evaporation capacity of over 200 kgH2O/m2/h and it replaces 22 rows of gas infra drying, giving the paper machine extra drying capacity but still using only half of the gas.

Technical Manager Tristano Rossi says: “Overall, Valmet handled this project very well and, for the start-up, we would rate it as trouble-free top performance, we cannot find any flaws. The technical expertise of Valmet's people at every step of the project, from sales to the start-up, was convincing, so the excellent end result is not a coincidence.”

Antonio Di Blas sums up: ‘All of our projects must be oriented towards lowering production costs and these dryers have definitely done that. We are just waiting to go forward with the second step of this project and also have new air dryers for our coating machine.’

Valmet´s famous air dryers PowerDry and TurnDry are now available under the renewed OptiDry air drying family.

( *Metso (Paper) until Dec. 31, 2013).