A variety of application criteria are used to assess different fabric designs. However, a fabric’s fiber support capability and drainage capacity have the greatest impact on papermaking.

Conventional fabric designs have always had limitations with respect to their cross-machine characteristics and when it came to supporting fibers. And this is exactly where Huyck.Wangner’s fabric specialists focused their attention when they developed SELECTRA. The breakthrough product has surmounted existing barriers thanks to a completely new warp design. The primary goal was to develop a fabric that followed the trend to finer weaves with lower marking tendencies, yet would still have sufficient free surface area on the paper side to ensure that drainage performance would not be compromised.

As a result of a committed development effort, Huyck.Wangner launched its SELECTRA generation of forming fabrics. The design, which is based on the extremely high performance, well established Optiply family, features a revolutionary warp concept. The unique warp structure takes care of cross-machine tension control, while at the same time combining with the weft to form the drainage channels. Cross-machine orientation and fiber support are thereby also defined by the warp concept to a large extent.

Because free surface area is over thirty percent, the design has broken through the 200 FSI (Fiber Support Index) barrier. As a result, these fine SELECTRA fabric types can be applied without restricting drainage in any way on machines where drainage is a hot topic. They have been proven to stabilize the drainage process, thereby contributing to further improvement in paper quality.