“Remote piloting started at Valmet last spring, when the coronavirus started to spread and the government imposed travel restrictions. Customers started to cancel test drives. We found ourselves in a difficult situation because customers’ investment projects also suffered due to the difficult test drives,” says Krista NukarinenHe works as a paper technology manager at Valmet's Järvenpää unit and is responsible for customer trials in the unit's coating and calendering technology group.
Valmet says that piloting is one of the important services it offers to customers. In addition to Järvenpää, Valmet's Paper business line has pilot plants in Jyväskylä, Inkeroinen and Karlstad in Sweden.
The start of the pandemic scared many customers who needed test drives because no one knew how long the situation would last. Test drives were only thought to be postponed for a while.
"As a rule, the customer is always involved in test drives, and this is how it still works with domestic customers. However, the corona situation limited travel from abroad, so we had to quickly think about how to handle test drives without the customer's physical presence."
Teams meetings had already become a practical everyday occurrence at this point. Valmet quickly set up a four-camera web-based remote piloting system to verify customer test drives conducted as normal on its test aircraft.
A similar remote test drive facility has been built for both the Jyväskylä Wet Head and Initial Drying Technology Center and the Järvenpää Post-Processing Equipment Technology Center.
According to Valmet, remote piloting with test machines has worked well for its main objectives from the beginning. The only exhausting element is that customers do not get to touch the samples, but receive them afterwards as a sample shipment.
"We have received a lot of positive feedback. In Järvenpää, the customer gets to see what happens with the paving machine, roll by roll. Because of this, we have managed to organize important test runs, even though in the spring it seemed that they would be canceled. It has turned out differently. Järvenpää is currently just as full as it is during normal times," says Nukarinen.
Valmet says it has considered whether remote piloting will become the norm in practice and believes that this will partly happen. A new piloting model is being evaluated, in which a distant customer sends only one person to the test machine, while other people monitor the test runs remotely. So, to some extent, the current practice will continue to exist in Valmet's test facilities even after the coronavirus.
The technology center has test machines for coating, calendering, winding and slitting. The coater has several coating stations, of which curtain coating in particular is currently playing an important role in the development and trial runs of various barrier technologies. Three pilot calenders are operated together with the coater for, among other things, speciality papers and boards.
Text and photo by Leif Lindberg
