Choosing the right doctor blade for a paper machine application can be a daunting task. There are numerous suppliers with extensive product ranges, often making the choice difficult. Here are some tips for selecting a doctor blade supplier, finding the right doctor blade for your application, and optimizing the doctor blade runnability.

Choosing a Doctor Blade Supplier

Doctor blade suppliers should:

• Be a partner.
• Be knowledgeable about your paper machine, doctor blade holder, and application needs.
• Have experience across various machine types with varying doctor systems.

A supplier with these traits can better help you select the right doctor blade for your application.

How to Choose the Right Blade

Once you have a supportive doctor blade supplier, there are tips for determining the best doctor blade for your application.

1. Determine the position needs for the application. Doctor blades typically serve multiple purposes such as removing water, cleaning contaminants off the roll, shedding the sheet, or conditioning the roll and maintaining proper surface roughness.
2. Choose the appropriate material. Consider a blade material that leads to extended blade life, higher temperature resistance, lower friction, higher machine direction stiffness, and/or more cross-machine direction conformability.
3. Optimize doctor blade runnability. Additionally, the blade angle and loading may be adjusted, and showering or oscillation may be introduced to provide better doctoring performance.

This is the first post in a two-part series about selecting the right doctor blade for your paper machine. Watch next month for part two and learn about blade materials and appropriate blades for different paper machine positions.