6 Pulp and Paper process control

6.1 Pulp and paper process control

Pulp and paper industries plays a very important role in

Canadian economical development. As the largest manufacturing
industry in Canada, most of these companies produce newsprint
paper. Traditionally, we make the profits from producing the
newsprint paper by means of high volume and low production cost.
However, we are now facing the international marketing
competition in low production cost newsprint paper, especially
from the South and the Tropics. This has pushed our industries
towards higher quality paper products, and greatly stimulates the
research and development for pulp and paper process control. Pulp
and paper processes are very complicated, in which the advanced
technology and operation experience are highly concentrated. The
fundamental requirements of pulp and paper mills are:

. good product quality,

2. low production cost,
3. high productivity,
4. efficient manufacturing operation (such as short operation
period),
. saving energy,
6. operation safety and equipment protection,
7. environment protection, and
8. utilizing the most advanced technology.

Paper mills produce products which range from fine papers

to corrugated cardboard. The product range requires that the basic
raw material of paper has fibre characteristics to meet the specific
grade production requirements. Chemical pulping digestion
processes have been widely applied in paper mills. However, the
effective control for such processes is still an unsolvable problem.
An obvious phenomenon in papermaking processes is time delay.
Time delay is also one of the important characteristics of non-
minimum-phase systems. The processes with time delay are often
very difficult to control. Meanwhile, papermaking process control
always deals with multivariables. For example, in the control of a
paper machine, basis weight and moisture are both coupled
strongly. Other additional variables such as opacity or color
control can also be involved. On a headbox, temperature, pulp
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concentration, pulp flow rate, and air pressure affect paper quality
simultaneously. In summary, important characteristics of pulp and
paper processes are:

1. batch process,
2. multivariable,
3. time-variant,
4. distributed parameter,
5. time delay,
6. nonlinear,
7. periodic operation procedure,
8. ill-formulated model, and
9. stochastic process.

The control problems involved in pulp and paper processes

are usually ill-structured, and difficult to be formulated. In such
processes, mathematical modelling is not amenable, and purely
algorithmic methods are difficult to use. However, AI techniques
provide programming methodology for solving these ill-formulated
engineering problems.

In pulp and paper processes, operating conditions are

frequently changed based on different production criteria. There
exist many periodic operation procedures. Expert systems are
suitable for use in such an environment. The stochastic occurrence
o f operational faults requires emergency handling in pulp and
paper processes. Intelligent fault diagnosis systems are very
powerful in dealing with such complex situations.

6.2 System configuration

As an academic research project to be developed for the

real industrial plant operation, I would like to "plan big, start
small', i.e., we first construct a basic framework for plant-wide
intelligent control system for pulp and paper processes. This
system is a "Front-to-End" frame, in which a digester in pulp
process is selected as the "Front" subprocess, while a paper machine
as the "End" subprocess. These two process units are not only the
most important equipments in production, but also the most
difficult ones to control. An intelligent scheduling system will be
developed to ensure operation planning, quality control, production
safety and environmental protection. An integrated intelligent
system is implemented as the software integration platform for the
above intelligent control systems (Figure 6.1).