Mr. Vinod Nargunam, Executive Director and Mr. Christy Selvan, Works Director, Scan Machineries Pvt. Ltd., shed some light on the new development at the company with regard to technological upgradations, and the future roadmap.
“Digital Twin is a very new concept that we are looking forward to working on, especially for paper mills that would like to find the trends in physical and chemical properties of new potential paper grades to open a bigger market for them.”
Paper Mart: Please highlight technology and quality development or up-gradation that recently took place.
Vinod Nargunam: Scan Machineries Pvt. Ltd. has many exciting things aligned for paper mills looking for ways to improve quality with our engineered products. We have designed and developed a new generation hydraulic jet headbox jointly with a European company. Currently, we are the only Indian manufacturer achieving the highest sheet formation with better cross profiles and uniform fiber orientation. One of them was recently supplied and commissioned at Emami Paper Mills.
In addition, we have started manufacturing high-end pressurised rectifier roll jet headboxes for achieving the highest paper quality at low speeds of paper machines. Our high-speed winders are now manufactured with automatic slitter knife positioning systems for faster roll width changes and for improving safety. Scan Machineries has also started to design and manufacture calendar rolls, specifically swimming rolls (kuster rolls), with a European supplier. And one of our customers has already witnessed the quality improvement by replacing their Chinese calendar with our newly supplied swimming calendar roll. Since our products are increasingly designed to be state-of-the-art, our love for automation has also grown wherein we have now started to take up projects with DCS and SCADA systems. The DCS system has been sought after nowadays along with our products for better data-driven analytics and control making it easier for operation and taking faster decisions in paper mills.
Watch: Evolution of Paper Based Packaging
PM: What have you been doing to foster innovation and R&D at your workplace?
Christy Selvan: We have started to work with a wide range of experienced companies in their respective product offerings for the paper industry. This has been motivating our team to keep developing and enhancing the quality of our products through frequent R&D trials and engineering at our production facility. We are always open to embracing feedback from the team of engineers and testing out new ideas.
PM: What is your technology and business roadmap for the coming times?
VN: We see that our newly launched products – hydraulic jet headbox, pressurised rectifier roll jet headbox, and our swimming calendar rolls – have been getting an increased demand in not just the Indian market but also globally, which shows the trust of customers in our products.
Our business model has always been to offer the right solutions to our customers according to their requirements. ‘Passion for Paper’ has always been our motto and we stand true to it by offering the right solutions to produce the highest quality of paper.
PM: Kindly elaborate on some of the industry 4.0 initiatives taken by your company.
CS: Scan Machineries’ automation solutions for paper mills are now active in the market. We are not just working on the level of process and automation systems in DCS but we are also working on the engineering station level necessary for engineering the ease of control between all operations in the paper mill. We are now working with paper mills to provide that Analytics of Data and find trends in their production processes in the form of KPIs and graphs.
Digital Twin is a very new concept that we are looking forward to working on, especially for paper mills that would like to find the trends in physical and chemical properties of new potential paper grades to open a bigger market for them. For this, we require historical data on the paper mill and advanced Machine Learning (ML) models.
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PM: With a plan in place to reduce carbon emissions, the paper industry is switching to sustainable and energy-efficient solutions. Please take us through some of the energy-efficient technologies by your company.
VN: One of the main energy efficiency targets in a paper mill is power consumption. This can be reduced drastically by selecting the right products, machinery and automation tools necessary to save energy while reducing costs.
Scan Machineries offers consultancy services consisting of years of paper industry experience necessary to find out the mishaps where energy-efficient system solutions are applicable. Using alternate sources of energy rather than burning coal also plays a huge role in reducing carbon emissions drastically. It can be seen that gas-fired boilers and the burning of wood or bio waste can also reduce carbon emissions.
