Thermal Energy Reduction in Papermaking Industries

Papermaking is an energy-intensive operation, due to the fact that most of the associated machinery and production procedures were designed at time when energy was both cheap and plentiful. With both the rising costs of energy and an increasing awareness of the environmental footprint of the paper industry, energy optimisation has become a crucial factor for paper mills to maintain their financial sustainability as well as customer satisfaction. According to the UK government statistics summarised in Table 1, in 2008 UK papermaking used on average 4MWhr per tonne of paper made.