Korea's Wolsan goes ahead with PM upgrade featuring Condebelt dryer

SINGAPORE, October 19, 2001 (paperloop.com) - Korea's Wolsan Paper is moving ahead with plans to upgrade a waste-based containerboard machine at its mill in the port city of Pusan in the far south of the country. The project, which began at the end of last year, is being carried out in two stages. The upgrade will boost the PM's productivity and quality of its paper output as well as improve the mil's competitiveness, according to a company spokesman, Sang Hyun Kim. The first stage of the upgrade, to be completed at the end of November, will boost the unit's speed and raise capacity by 180/tonne day of containerboard to 580 tonnes/day. The machine's press section has already been upgraded following installation of shoe presses supplied by Metso Paper. The speed of the 4.6 m trim width unit has been increased from 600 m/min to 850 m/min. The second stage will focus on improving product quality with the installation of a new dryer and headbox, to be delivered by the end of 2003. The company has placed an order with Metso Paper for a Condebelt dryer and a new headbox for the second phase of the work. The innovative Condebelt drying process uses heat and pressure from steel belts to produce liner with a high standard of smoothness, strength and printability. Moreover, the mill will be able to use 100% recovered paper as furnish, instead of expensive virgin fiber. Wolsan Paper is fully owned by Dong Il Paper, which started up Asia's first Condebelt dryer at its Ansan mill near Seoul in January 1999. This was the first commercial scale installation of this new drying technology in the world, and followed the 1996 startup of a small-scale unit at Stora Enso's Pankakoski mill in Finland.