# Valmet Company radar · 2,078 documents · 2021-01-01–2026-11-03 · updated 2026-10-31 Canonical: https://slate.greyb.com/radar/valmet/innovations ## In one minute ### A forming section removes water with a shoe that moves inside its own belt loop In a sleeve roll, a belt runs around a stationary axle and a curved forming element presses against the belt's inner face. Water leaves the stock in the rising pressure along that curve, and the sliding surface is lubricated and placed ahead of the element in the belt's direction of travel so the fabric can pass over it [1]. The element hangs on a hinge at the axle and can be pushed out to change the cross-sectional shape of the belt loop [2]. It is positioned by an eccentric that locks the adjusting arm in place, which removes a screw that would otherwise hold position against constant torque while the machine runs [3]. The axle beam itself is given a polygonal cross-section, a compromise that keeps it rigid along its length while letting the sliding surface cover 30 to 120 degrees of wrap [4]. All of the cost sits in the belt. One design uses three reinforcement layers and builds the middle one to yield when the belt bends around the curve, so the bend radius does not fatigue the main reinforcement [5]. Another moves the belt's neutral axis with auxiliary yarns to stop the outer surface wearing through [6]. A third puts solid lubricant particles in the polyurethane so the belt slides against the shoe with less friction, cast against a moulding surface that can also carry grooves [7]. 1. [EP3913133B1](/?paper=EP3913133B1&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard) 2. [EP3913134B1](/?paper=EP3913134B1&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard) 3. [EP4653612A1](/?paper=EP4653612A1&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard) 4. [EP3913136B1](/?paper=EP3913136B1&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard) 5. [JP7295902B2](/?paper=JP7295902B2&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard) 6. [US2023183923A1](/?paper=US2023183923A1&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard) 7. [US2023250583A1](/?paper=US2023250583A1&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard) ### The capital orders still arriving are mostly second and third machines at sites Valmet already runs Anhui Linping's PM 9 is the clearest case: a complete board line from headbox to winder for lightweight fluting and liner, ordered in October 2026 for a 2028 start-up, at a site where Valmet installed PM 8. It was followed within three weeks by a coated board line for an unnamed Asian producer, also a 2028 start-up, also bundled with automation and lifecycle services. ### Valve capacity is being bought and the pump business is being sold The clearest strategic act of the last two years is a portfolio exchange in flow control. Valmet paid USD 480 million for Severn Group, completed on 1 July 2026, acquiring severe-service valve capability with manufacturing in the USA, UK and India, explicitly to take Flow Control beyond its biomaterials base into mining, refining and chemicals. That purchase sits on top of organically built capacity: a Sorocaba plant rated above 12,000 valve sets a year alongside a service centre, and a combined service centre and manufacturing unit in Sydney aimed at mining, metals and refining as much as pulp. ### Two positions measured outside the refiner describe a gap nobody can see A refiner gap is a dimension inside a hot, steam-filled, abrasive space. The workaround is differential measurement: track the position of the processing element that is being moved, and separately the position of the actuating unit that moves it. The difference is the clearance that has developed in the adjustment mechanism, so the wear estimate comes from two readings taken outside the refining zone. ### Tissue is bought on energy per tonne and keeps coming back Beskidy chose its machine on low electricity and gas consumption at a defined production volume, and said so. Irving's third through-air-drying machine came inside a USD 600 million site expansion, which is the other way tissue gets bought — as a package with converting and warehousing rather than as a standalone machine. ### Fiber packaging is the one new platform with a commercial line behind it 3D Fiber launched in June 2026, and within three months the first commercial-scale line was ordered for Metsä Group's Äänekoski site, with start-up in 2028, a nominal capacity above 100 million products a year and booking in the third quarter of 2026. In October 2026 the company extended its piloting collaboration with VTT at Jyväskylä to carry fibre-based products from early development through demonstration. ### Refiner plates are built to wear into a fresh cutting edge A refining bar dulls as it wears, so one plate design puts cavities inside the bar itself: shallower at the leading edge, deeper at the trailing edge. As the bar wears down, hidden edges emerge gradually and the refining action stays closer to constant across the plate's life. Pressure is the other wear driver. In the last box before the plate's outer periphery, pressure peaks form and erode unevenly, so at least three bars carry a fluid connection within 0 to 15 mm of the last dam, equalising pressure between neighbouring final boxes. ### Measurement and valves have customers in other industries; the controller does not The automation work with named external customers is measurement. Two IQ quality control systems went to Vietnamese tissue lines, and a corrugator warp control system went to a US corrugated box producer whose problem was moisture imbalance rather than papermaking as such. The virtual sensor launch in April 2026 sells the same way, as a prediction product that reduces fibre and starch rather than as part of a control platform. ## Overview Read as a whole, the record shows a company shifting its centre of gravity toward the parts that wear out on machines already standing. The patents cluster on wear surfaces, seals, edges and joins, and the spending has followed them: consumable capacity is being expanded in cast metal and in press felts while new-line manufacturing is being cut back. ## What's new Valmet's review for January to September, published on 27 October, reported orders of EUR 1,408 million, up 30% as reported and 25% organically, and comparable EBITA of EUR 169 million at a 12.4% margin, a third-quarter record. The shares rose 6.8% on the day. ## Research ### Wear parts are being given the instrument that says when they are spent A belt with a wear indicator built into its body turns an emergency shutdown into a replacement planned inside a scheduled outage. A suction roll seal carries a non-contacting indicator that defines its remaining wear margin, so the seal holder does not have to be opened to learn how much material is left. Suction rolls that must run in both directions use two identical lubricated seals on the suction box side walls, set as mirror images, which removes the direction-of-rotation constraint from the machine layout. ### Controller availability is engineered at the I/O data area One design splits the controller into a main communication state and a monitoring state, adjusts the redundancy frequency dynamically, and synchronises the I/O module's data area in the redundant controller. A switch then no longer needs the connection to the I/O re-established, which is where the time used to go. A more radical version separates logic processing from I/O scanning: the scanning module switches on a fault while the controller keeps running, so no controller switch happens at all. A third relies on broadcast messages that the standby controller only listens to and stores, taking over when the primary fails without extra network traffic. ### Boiler tube life is managed by measuring the ash and the gas Chloride and potassium attack superheater tubes, and no probe goes on the tube surface. So the composition of electrostatic precipitator ash is measured and the black liquor combustion adjusted around it, which holds those elements where they do less damage while keeping recoverable cooking chemicals in the process. Ash can be selectively treated and recirculated on the same logic. In a fluidised bed, a sulphur reagent is fed to the bed-material fraction rather than to the flue gas, so it meets the alkali chlorides in the bed and converts them to sulphates before they reach a heat transfer surface. ### A compressed plug of fibre is the pressure seal in pretreatment Feeding chipped biomass into a pressurised reactor needs a barrier that is not a valve, and the answer is the material itself: a screw compresses and dewaters it until the plug holds the pressure. One system uses two such plugs bracketing the impregnation step and deliberately sets them to different dryness, the first compressing harder than the second, so material enters the reactor at the right consistency through screw and hole geometry rather than a control loop. ### One stripper ties the whole liquor cycle together Take 5 to 10 volume percent of the green liquor, strip it with carbon dioxide, and the hydrogen sulphide that comes off feeds a sulphuric acid plant. The CO2 can be captured flue gas or the off-gas from lignin separation, which is what lets the loop close instead of importing acid. The bicarbonate side stream from the same stripper leaches phosphorus out of lime mud and precipitator ash as a 0.25 to 5 molar solution, so non-process elements leave without lime being purged from the cycle. Acid from the same source can drive lignin precipitation, alkaline first and acidic second, so the mill acidifies with something it made itself. The acid plant has been simplified alongside: sulphur trioxide is cooled and reacted with water directly, and the acid is concentrated by circulation and sparging in a condensing tower, which removes the strengthening tower. ### Small unit operations carry the pulp side Most of the gains in established machinery are in single steps rather than in the drum. A continuously operating cross-flow filter takes suspended solids out of white liquor to below roughly 1 ppm before a polysulfide reactor, which ends the periodic filter-bed regeneration and the downtime that came with it. Hydrogen sulphide is stripped from liquor by an injector that uses the liquor's own flow to draw the reagent gas in and shear it into small bubbles, raising the reaction area and shortening residence time. Green liquor dregs are carbonated with flue gas in a vessel with a pH sensor, turning a waste stream into fill or fertiliser material. A purge from an ash treatment plant is cooled to precipitate sodium salts, and the liquid left over is treated again for its residual sodium. ### Tissue converting replaces the operator's hand and ear with transducers Setting an embossing nip used to be a judgement made by feel. The functional roller is now moved by two actuators, one at each end. Force transducers find first contact, that position becomes the reference, and position transducers then move the roller a set distance from it, equally at both ends so the rollers stay parallel across the width. A glue applicator roller gets the same treatment: approached until load cells detect contact, then backed off a measured distance. ### Molded fiber moves the design problem into the tool Drainage in a molded fiber mould is normally inherited from the mesh on its face. Printing the mould makes the surface itself permeable: a layer with no defined holes, an undefined porous structure that passes air and water while holding fibre, so the drainage pattern becomes a design file rather than a purchased mesh. Later versions split the functions. A double layer with a cavity between them carries one layer porous from cavity to product surface and a second with perforations isolated from the cavity, so through-holes and surface finish are specified independently. A solid edge around the porous face stops steam escaping during hot pressing, and a detachable skin, snapped or bolted on, allows cleaning and product release. ### The retrofit-grade inventions sell; the ones that need a new plant have no installation yet Read the filings by what they attach to. Rotating tube supports, cleaning channels in discharge housings, edge covers, mirror-image seals and tool-free clamps all fit equipment already standing in a mill, and several are written explicitly for that. The process plants are different. A two-plug pretreatment train, gas-phase impregnation, a green liquor stripper and a printed refiner segment each describe a new unit rather than an addition, and I found no named installation behind any of them. That is the split that matters commercially in this portfolio: the inventive effort has moved into the parts a mill can bolt on, while the new chemical and mechanical cores wait for a customer who is rebuilding rather than repairing. ## Market ### Energy has found a demand source outside the pulp cycle The pulp orders in this area are still largely lifecycle: a boiler built in 1985 rebuilt, a fiberline from 1975 and 1990 replaced. New pulp capacity still buys the whole scope at once, as Sun Paper's Yandian mill did with cooking, fiberline, recovery boiler, ash crystallization, analyzers and a boiler optimizer in a single order. ### New process chemistry is bought as an uptime interval, not as a yield The ash crystallization plant at Mercer Stendal is the only recent order I can find for a genuinely new chemical unit, and the way it was justified is instructive. It was sold on closing the mill's chemical circulation and extending recovery boiler maintenance intervals to 24 months and beyond, with the environmental benefit attached to that. ### The recurring revenue is real but is disclosed only as product news I found no standalone service or maintenance agreement announcement in the public record. What exists instead is product launches and capacity investment: Bioneer press roll covers with cradle-to-gate CO₂ figures, a renewed sizer roll cover family tested in laboratory and mill conditions, and an EUR 18 million press felt line investment in Tampere. ### The market is now pricing a corporate split, not the order book The operating figures and the share price moved in opposite directions. Second-quarter 2026 net sales rose 6 per cent organically to EUR 1,315 million with comparable EBITA of EUR 152 million at an 11.5 per cent margin, while orders received fell 9 per cent organically to EUR 1,373 million on continued weakness in biomaterial services; the stock then rose nearly 20 per cent on the announcement of a strategic review to separate the two segments. The review itself covers a potential split of Biomaterial Solutions and Services from Process Performance Solutions into two companies listed in Helsinki. ### New lines are in Asia and the Middle East; rebuilds are in Europe and North America The geography of the order book splits by kind of work. Board, tissue and kraft lines are going to China, India, Southeast Asia and Saudi Arabia, with China dominant in 2026. The European and North American work is different in nature: a bleach plant and evaporation rebuild in India, a board machine rebuild, a headbox and forming section replacement at a US fine paper mill. ## Strategy ### Consumables are being scaled in cast metal while a printing route sits in the portfolio The Valkeakoski refiner-segment plant was expanded in 2026: two machining centres added in summer 2025 and two foundry furnaces in early 2026, lifting in-house machining capacity by 24 per cent, justified on delivery reliability and casting quality. That is capital committed to casting and machining bars and grooves. ### New machines are being built in fewer places, and the effort is moving to the parts that fit existing ones Valmet moved to close manufacturing at Sundsvall and to adjust operations in Gothenburg and Jelenia Góra, affecting roughly 350 roles across Sweden and Poland, then concluded negotiations covering temporary layoffs of about 2,400 people in Finland running to the end of 2026. Both were framed around the competitiveness of the biomaterials business and a lower-than-anticipated workload. ### The textile recycling line kept filing after its only customer failed Renewcell, the sole disclosed customer for Valmet's recycled-textile pulp process, went bankrupt in February 2024. The filings did not stop. Two-stage ozone bleaching with intermediate washing, and metal removal tight enough to qualify the pulp for viscose or lyocell, remain active lines published after that collapse. ## Areas - Wood & Fiber Processing · 536 documents - Automation & Control · 500 documents - Paper & Board Making · 461 documents - Energy & Bioenergy · 293 documents - Pulp Production & Chemical Recovery · 169 documents - Tissue & Molded Fiber · 116 documents