After 30+ hours of travel we made it to Sweden on Monday! Our nine students came from all over the state of Maine, from Madawaska to South Berwick, to make the trip. We are very excited to be here exploring the pulp and paper industry!
On our first day we visited both of the Valmet locations in Karlstad. The first location focused on research and development and is the main office of our wonderful tour guide, Anders Hjort. We learned about the history of Valmet and the continuous digester and recieved a "crash course" in the pulping process. In addition we were also introduced to some of the pulping innovations that Valmet offers and some of the mills around the world that currently use their technology.
In the afternoon we traveled to the second Karlstad location to learn about the tissue division of Valmet, which is also the home of the only foundry in the world that has the capabilites to produce cast iron Yankee cylinders. We learned about the global tissue market and the current growth and what technologies were available to support this growing segment of this industry. On our tour of the facility we learned about the casting process and saw a Yankee cylinder in each stage of manufacturing. Tissue machine headboxes, among other equipment, are also machined in Karlstad, and we truly had an inside look into a piece of the papermaking process that many of us will handle daily in our careers. This Valmet location also assembles tissue machines on site , and we had the opportunity to see two machines at different stages in the assembly process.
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