● Contract trials · Toll production · Lemi · Finland
A pilot plant is where a material process proves itself between the laboratory and the factory: large enough to generate real production data, small enough that experiments are affordable and failure is cheap. Loonshot Factory operates an industrial fibre pilot plant in Lemi, Finland — a full fourdrinier pilot paper machine, batch pulping and refining, molded fibre development, and an on-site pulp-and-paper laboratory — available on contract.
You bring a material concept, a feedstock or a product specification. We run the trials, measure everything, and hand you a documented process that can carry investment decisions, customer qualifications and scale-up.
CAPABILITIES · 01
Batch pulping of recycled textile fibre, agrofibres and other non-wood raw materials, then systematic refining development on industrial equipment. Energy curves, freeness targets and fibre morphology are measured, not guessed.
What we develop →Full pilot runs on our fourdrinier machine: forming, pressing, drying and reeling of packaging-grade papers from novel furnishes. Machine-made paper in roll form — material your customers can actually convert and test — with parameters recorded run by run.
Forming and thermoforming trials for trays, clamshells and protective packaging from novel pulps, with rapid prototype tooling.
Molded fibre packaging →Tensile, tear, burst, Cobb, porosity, freeness and optical fibre analysis on site, plus an extended external network for barrier, food-contact and compostability testing.
Full instrument list →SCALE · 02
Engagements scale with your project, not the other way around. A first trial can be a single pulping batch or one machine day. A development project runs for weeks with recipe iteration and a documented data pack at the end. When a process is proven, the same facility runs it as recurring toll production — contract manufacturing on pilot-scale equipment, producing real sellable material while your own capacity is financed and built. The four engagement levels are described under access tiers.
PROCESS · 03
STEP 01
Target material, feedstock, specifications and success criteria agreed in advance.
STEP 02
Feedstock logistics, furnish preparation, trial plan with measurement points.
STEP 03
Experienced operators run the equipment; you are welcome on the floor throughout.
STEP 04
Laboratory testing against the agreed specification.
STEP 05
A written trial report with full parameter records and results — yours to keep and reuse.
Confidentiality is standard practice: client projects are anonymised by default and most programs run under NDA.
QUESTIONS · 04
A pilot plant reproduces the essential physics of a production process at reduced scale. For fibre-based materials that means real continuous forming, pressing and drying — the things a laboratory sheet former cannot show. Companies use contract pilot trials to de-risk scale-up, produce demonstration material for customer qualification, generate investment-grade data, and avoid capital commitment until the process has earned it.
Yes — clients are welcome on the floor throughout. Most trials benefit from having the technical owner present when parameters are being set.
CONTACT
Describe the material, the feedstock and what you need to prove — we respond with a concrete trial plan.
