The introduction of tesa EasySplice® technology at Stora Enso Kabel made the production process faster, safer, and smoother. A fully developed product and close cooperation between the companies made this possible.

A papermaker applies the tape to the tambour to be spliced, crossing it at a slight angle.

Just imagine taking two rolls of tightly wound, wafer-thin paper wound around rolls 30 centimeters in diameter and trying to splice them together seamlessly – using just an adhesive strip, with precision down to the nearest millimeter, and without forming wrinkles. That is a challenge by itself. But then there is trying to splice two webs on rolls 7.4 meters wide and two meters in diameter, each rotating on its own axis at speeds of at least 100 kilometers per hour – and the layman’s mind reels. But not Ulrich Böttcher’s. The trained process engineer has worked at tesa for more than 16 years, the past six of them as a Special Account Manager.

Working together with two other colleagues, the serves tesa’s clients in the paper goods industry
throughout Germany – he is long accustomed to the dimensions and challenges usual in the industry. And yet: When, six years ago, the task at hand was establishing the “flying splice” using the new EasySplice ® FastLine technology from tesa, it was an exciting matter even for him. The aim was to optimize the process by which the paper wound on the rolls (called “tambours” in the trade) is spliced together to form an endless web, so that there are no interruptions in the production process. Until then, paper webs had been spliced together using labor-intensive geometric patterns. “There we stood in front of the machine, watching the process, feverishly hoping everything would go off without a hitch,” Böttcher recalls.

About 1,600 meters per minute is the speed of a coater.

From challenge to routine

Nowadays, flying splices have become an everyday routine that the plant’s employees easily manage. A papermaker applies the tape to the tambour to be spliced, crossing it at a slight angle. This takes about five minutes – as opposed to the previous splicing methods, which took almost fifteen. Then the new tambour is mechanically moved into position next to the tambour that is running out.

Once the old tambour is almost at an end, the employee removes the rest of the liner from the tape. As soon as the new tambour is synchronized to the speed of the coater (about 1,600 meters per minute), the roll is affixed in a split second to the web that is running out. The adhesive joint connects the new web with the old one and is sliced off afterward with a cutter.

Every month, this plant uses this process to connect paper webs together 600 to 700 times on ach of its three production lines, making for a daily production of more than 500 tons. And yet every web change is still a critical moment in paper production. For that reason, the technicians strive to design splices to be as problem-free as possible. “With the new technology, we have even been able to improve our splice rate, meaning the number of splices that have gone successfully and without disruptions, from 96.5 percent to nearly 99 percent,” explains day shift foreman Hans-Jürgen Schubert.

And those 2.5 percent mean a lot to the paper technician, because every rip is followed by a shutdown of the machine – and that takes time, which costs money. “Our performance is also measured by these rates,” says Schubert.