Valve Maintenance

In many mills, pipes hang from the ceiling. As part of the piping, valves which are used to regulate flow must be operated from below. A recent incident at one of our member's mills, where an employee was hit by a valve falling from 25 feet, shows the importance of maintenance or possible replacement of those valves. He required six stitches, but because he was hearing a bump cap, his injury was not as bad as it could have been.

A description of the incident and the follow-up actions can be found here.


LATEST NEWS

Industry Benchmarking Survey
The 2025 Profile Study will be initiated this December for first-quarter ’25 sampling. Past Survey reports can be accessed at this member-only page.

2024 Fall Roundtable
On October 16 and 17, we held our highly-rated RPTA Fall Roundtable on Paper Machine Roll Design and Operation, in Appleton, Wisconsin. The slides from our four-hour technical seminar on various types of rolls and press optimization are available at this RPTA members only site, along with materials from other past RPTA educational events.  The Roundtable also included tours of two Andritz roll facilities.

UPCOMING EVENTS

2025 Winter Webinar
On January 22nd, we will hold a webinar on Recovered Fiber Grades & Quality. Shawn State, President of Pratt Recycling at Pratt Industries, will discuss recovered fiber grades and quality trends.  He will be followed by Pat McEnroe, Product Group Director at Kadant Black Clawson, who will discuss process strategies to deal with contaminants in recovered fiber sources.

2025 Production-Technical Seminar
The event is May 4-7, 2025,  at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

This year,  the RPTA Seminar will be more integrated with the TAPPICon Conference.  RPTA members will register through RPTA and your registration will include all TAPPICon sessions and events, at a substantial savings over past years’ registration fees. 

RPTA will still recruit presentations on topics of current interest to our members:  Safer Operations, Product Strength Improvement Methods; and Waste Reduction. In addition, RPTA will host a two-hour mini-course on paper machine wet end chemistry, provided by a well-respected expert.