Adrian Honig, Product Manager Refiner/Deflaker at Voith Paper, confirms: “We have developed a completely new refiner concept that clearly stands out in terms of both design and performance. During development, we pursued the highest quality standards. In line with our “Papermaking Vision” design concept, the focus was on an attractive appearance, optimized user interfaces and the implementation of a clean design. We are therefore very pleased to have won the Focus Open Baden-Württemberg International Design Award together with the design agency Defortec.”

Last year, Voith introduced the long-standing and visionary design study Papermaking Vision. The holistic concept takes into account all aspects of papermaking and aims to simplify maintenance and operation of the equipment, reduce interfaces through a higher degree of networking, and further increase efficiency, safety and sustainability. An attractive design supports the functionality and at the same time ensures a uniform appearance.

Optimized user guidance, work safety and maintenance efficiency

Compared to conventional refiners, the award-winning InfibraFiner has an additional capacity of up to 28 percent and is designed to be extremely energy-saving. The refiner is characterized by clear structures, high-quality surfaces and modern materials. The new design combines the modern appearance with numerous technological advantages that enable a significantly more constant and energy-optimized refining process. For optimum user guidance, Voith experts developed SmartLights that are mounted on the cover of the refiner. With the help of three-colored illuminated segments, the SmartLight provides information at any time and at a glance about the machine status, performance and current maintenance status of the refiner. For this purpose, numerous parameters such as temperature, pressure and vibration profile are recorded and evaluated. All relevant information is also displayed in the control room by the system’s Maintenance Manager and on a monitor on site. This enables the operating personnel to intervene quickly in the event of a malfunction. Another focus of the development was a very high level of occupational safety and particularly user-friendly maintenance by means of a compact design. The smooth outer surfaces allow easy cleaning. All electronic components and cabling are well protected and integrated into the machine in the control cabinet, which was specially designed for the InfibraFiner. Thanks to the gearbox, which is also integrated, the space requirement is additionally reduced and the ease of maintenance is improved.

Adrian Honig sums up the new innovation: “With the InfibraFiner, we have reached another milestone in the realization of our papermaking vision and added a new machine to our BlueLine product family. Currently, the InfibraFiner is still in the trial phase, but we are confident that we will soon be able to offer it to the global market.”