Profession digester operator
Digester operators, or cooks, cook wood chips with soda ash or acid to separate the wood pulp from unwanted constituents. They test the resulting solution.
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Personality Type
- Realistic / Conventional
Knowledge
- Types of paper
The different criteria used to determine differences in paper types such as coarseness and thickness, and the different fabrication methods and wood types from which the types of paper stem.
- Types of wood
Types of wood, such as birch, pine, poplar, mahogany, maple and tulipwood.
- Types of pulp
Kinds of pulp are distinguished based on their fibre type and the specific chemical processes through which they were created.
- Types of digesters
This includes the stationary and rotary steam digesters, which cook wood chips in an acid solution to make pulp for use in the manufacture of paper.
Skills
- Operate digester machine
Add cooking chemicals and steam to dissolve lignin and separate the plant fibres, breaking down wood chips to recover pulp after a bleaching and drying process.
- Work safely with machines
Check and safely operate machines and equipment required for your work according to manuals and instructions.
- Monitor pulp quality
Avoid lesser quality and lower grades of recycled paper and pulp by keeping an eye open for stickies, plastics, colour, unbleached fibres, brightness, and dirt.
- Concentrate pulp slurry
Measure the weight and concentration of the pulp slurry for further processing and storage by using disk filters and calculating slurry density with specific formulas.
- Wash fibres
Remove the chemical solution of the digesting process, making paper pulp soft and fibrous.