Paper mill 2:
The slurry enters a series of wet tanks and spreads throughout the liquid. The liquid is then spread over rollers like the ones shown above. The rolling flattens out the liquid which loosely adheres to the drums in thin layers of fiber and liquid. The wet fiber filled layer has some rigidity due to the glue and intertwining of the fibers. It's drawn off the wet rollers to other rollers which in turn are drier and drier until a single thin wet sheet of fiber and glue strong enough is made which can be drawn off. The cross bars below knock off lumps and drops of water.
After initial conditioning and flattening the final smoothing stage is entered. At this point the paper is fairly strong but still very moist, like a wet tissue but a bit stronger.
The very damp papers enters the drying stage which is a series of heated rollers.
The paper runs up and down sets of rollers large hot rollers.
The rollers with the overhead cover to retain heat.
The last stage is rolling up the final product. The paper can is sold in rolls or taken to another machine which takes the paper off the roll cutting it into sheets. There are a few shops in Changde which buy the sheets and further cut them to requirements of buyers i.e. 8x11.
What's sort of intriguing is the speed of the final stage of the process. The paper whizzes by out of the single wet long sheet stage into the dryers then onto the last roller. The question in how do they adjust the speed of the stages upstream to the speed of the final take-up roll? The roll is getting larger and larger in diameter each turn so per revolution getting faster and faster. The wet pickoff stage and roller dryer stages. The upstream stages are probably not adjustable so it must be in this last roller stage. There is probably a sensor for the paper speed that adjusts the voltage to the roller motor. There might also be a tensioner in the arm holding the roll i.e. rocking it back and forth to adjust for incoming paper speed.
