There comes a point in the industrial life of a plant builder when maturity ceases to be a stated quality and becomes a measurable one. It seldom coincides with a single contract, or with a successful start-up. It coincides, rather, with the day on which no portion of the line remains that the company must entrust to third parties or, worse, decline to offer at all.
For EILREPLUS that day has come, and it takes concrete form in two original developments from its own R&D division: the first already protected by patent, the second at an advanced stage in its international protection process, based on a technological solution engineered around an original EilReplus architecture.
The first is a welded steel Yankee dryer. The patented element lies in the joining system between the heads and the shell, eliminating bolted connections and creating a single, continuous structure. For a given paper width, the solution allows the Yankee face width to be minimized, reducing energy losses and enabling installation even on existing machines where the available space between the machine frames is limited.
The welded Yankee, like the bolted version already in the EilReplus product range, is equipped with a latest-generation condensate removal system consisting of a double row of tapered soda straws per header. This arrangement ensures uniform condensate removal across the entire cylinder surface, with minimal pressure drop and high operating efficiency.
The second development, no less significant, concerns a shoe press whose loading system is entirely pneumatic, as is the system used to engage the press against the Yankee.
The absence of hydraulic circuits reduces plant complexity, and the maintenance demands typical of hydraulic solutions, with attendant gains in simplicity, reliability and running costs. Beyond allowing the nip pressure curve to be varied, the solution incorporates an innovative system for distributing the load uniformly across the full width of the shoe, and is capable of reaching linear loads of up to 140 kN/m. The shoe itself is made of an innovative polymer compound with integrated sensors, developed by EilReplus in collaboration with a leading company in the field of high-performance polymer materials. Ownership of the architecture and of the related patented solution rests entirely with EilReplus.
The significance of this step, however, does not end with the description of the two components. Anyone familiar with the sector’s tendering processes knows that the technical specification works as a binary filter. When the specification calls for a shoe press or for a Yankee free of bolted joints, a supplier that lacks that solution drops out of the process before any discussion of engineering, reliability or price can even begin. It is not a question of merit, but of meeting a technological threshold. EilReplus has encountered that threshold before. Today, it moves beyond it.
The production lines requiring these configurations now fall fully within the company’s technological capabilities, backed by the same design competence and the same depth of service that the market has long recognized across the rest of the machine. It is worth noting that neither development has been conceived as a stand-alone addition to the company’s technological platform.
Both developments arise within an organization that integrates mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and automation, as well as air and thermal systems, designing each discipline in relation to the others rather than in isolation. It is precisely this condition that makes possible, for instance, a revamping project addressing the Yankee and the press together, within a single project, with one point of contact, one project manager and one shutdown schedule.
The benefit to the papermaker is not merely commercial. It is the assurance that the interfaces between components were conceived by the party accountable for both and not negotiated downstream between different suppliers. The capacity to conceive, engineer and deliver a complete tissue line is concentrated in a small number of players worldwide. Smaller still is the number of organizations able to engineer all its principal technological disciplines in-house. EilReplus brings together in-house expertise in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, automation, and air and thermal systems.
Electrical and automation engineering, in particular, is managed internally, without the need to entrust it to outside firms: a trait that sets the EilReplus model apart even within the restricted group of builders able to offer a complete tissue line. It is a distinguishing feature that goes beyond the completeness of the supply. It means designing mechanics, drives, control and process from the outset as parts of a single system, with integrated design responsibility and no technological interfaces delegated to external suppliers.
With the welded Yankee and the new shoe press, EilReplus completes the last critical elements of its technological offering and further strengthens its position among the limited number of manufacturers capable of engineering and integrating the entire tissue line, from mechanical systems to electrical engineering and automation, through to air and thermal systems.
The patent filing therefore does not close a path but opens a new one: the same R&D structure that developed these solutions is already at work on the technological evolutions to come. The method remains the one that has brought EilReplus this far: starting from the real needs of those who make paper every day and working back from there to the engineering.
Both solutions are already available for inclusion in new proposals, offering customers the opportunity to integrate these technologies into both greenfield plants and upgrades to existing machines. EilReplus is therefore ready to deploy these solutions across its projects in Italy and throughout all international markets in which the company operates, adapting them to the specific technical and production requirements of each installation.
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