Dry Ice Blasting for Paper Machines: Cleaning Headboxes, Dryer Sections, and Yankee Cylinders Without Downtime

A paper machine only performs as well as the surfaces the sheet actually touches. Resin, “stickies,” and mineral scale build up gradually on headboxes, dryer cans, and Yankee cylinders, and by the time it’s visible in sheet quality - breaks, holes, uneven moisture profiles - the buildup has usually been accumulating for weeks. The traditional fixes each come with a cost: pressure washing introduces water into a machine that can’t tolerate it, and manual scraping risks scoring precision roll and cylinder surfaces that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace.

This is why dry ice blasting has become the standard cleaning method for the paper machine itself, and it’s the core technology behind our Paper Mill & Tissue Facility Cleaning service. This post builds on our broader guides to paper mill cleaning fundamentals and NFPA 654 dust compliance.

Why Water and Abrasives Fall Short on Paper Machines

A dryer section runs at temperatures and speeds where any residual moisture left behind by a wet cleaning method becomes a real risk - trapped water in a bearing housing or control cabinet can lead to corrosion or a short circuit long after the cleaning crew has left. Abrasive media, meanwhile, changes the surface profile of precision components in ways that directly affect sheet quality and web tension.

Dry ice blasting solves both problems at once. CO2 pellets sublimate on contact - they turn directly from solid to gas - so there’s no secondary moisture and no grit left behind to clean up afterward.

Where It Matters Most on a Paper Machine

Headboxes. Resin and fiber buildup inside the headbox affects sheet formation and consistency. Dry ice blasting removes it in place without the disassembly a wet clean would otherwise require.

Dryer sections. Dryer cans accumulate a glaze of hardened residue over a production run that reduces heat transfer efficiency - meaning the dryer has to work harder to hit the same moisture target, which shows up as higher energy costs long before it shows up as a maintenance ticket.

Yankee cylinders. In tissue production specifically, the Yankee cylinder’s surface finish is directly tied to crepe quality. Buildup here isn’t just a cleanliness issue - it’s a product quality issue, similar in principle to how starch buildup affects flute quality on a corrugator, which we cover in Advanced Cleaning in Corrugated Plants.

Clean-in-Place, Not Teardown

Because dry ice blasting works without disassembly in most applications, it fits inside a planned maintenance window rather than requiring an extended shutdown of its own. Crews can clean in place while other maintenance work happens in parallel, which is a meaningful difference when a mill’s entire cleaning window is a once- or twice-a-year outage.

The Kelly Difference

Dry ice blasting is one of our core specialties, and it’s a technique we apply across paper, tissue, and corrugated environments - you can read more about the method itself in our general guide to Dry Ice Blasting & Specialty Cleaning. Every technician who runs this equipment on your paper machine is a full-time Kelly employee, trained specifically for the constraints of an active production environment - not a subcontractor learning your equipment on the job.

Next, we’ll look at the other side of this problem: managing stickies, resin, and wax buildup across the mill more broadly, beyond just the machine itself.