“Honeywell’s advanced bleaching package saved Catalyst Paper’s Elk Falls facility more than $500,000 annually on chemical consumption alone. However, even more valuable than that was the increased output and reduction in variability we were able to achieve, resulting in better quality paper at greater production rates.”
Dwight Anderson, Senior Process Control Systems Specialist, Catalyst Paper
Catalyst Paper needed to update its control technology and find a way to cut its high chemical costs in the Thermal Mechanical Pulp (TMP) bleach plant at its Elk Falls facility. In addition, the mill wanted to identify a solution to reduce variability in its final pulp brightness. The company turned to Honeywell to maximize plant performance and a multi-tiered solution was implemented. The solution involved installing Honeywell’s Advanced TMP Bleaching Control package. This package included two Honeywell Precision Optical Sensors and one Honeywell Precision Residual Sensor to measure pulp brightness and residual bleaching chemical concentrations, respectively. The additional process information obtained from these sensors enabled the implementation of a Multivariable Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategy using Profit® Controller, Honeywell’s patented MPC package. Benefits of this project include:
Catalyst Paper realized several benefits from using Honeywell’s bleaching and process control technology at its Elk Falls facility.
Catalyst is a leading producer of writing and printing papers in North America. The company also produces market kraft pulp and owns Western Canada’s largest paper recycling facility. With five mills employing 3,800 people within a 160-kilometer radius on the south coast of British Columbia, Catalyst has a combined annual capacity of 2.4 million tons of product. Catalyst Paper Corporation common shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol CTL. The company headquarters are in Vancouver.
Located near the Campbell River on the east coast of Vancouver Island, the Elk Falls site is a world-class integrated pulp and paper facility that produces newsprint, specialty printing papers, kraft paper and sawdust-based kraft pulp for customers around the world. Elk Falls began operation in 1952 as a single-line newsprint mill. Today, Elk Falls has an annual production capacity of 840,000 tons of pulp, paper and kraft paper.
Catalyst Paper faced the challenge of lowering the operating costs of the Elk Falls bleaching plant by reducing chemical consumption. At the same time it also faced the challenge of optimizing operation to reduce the final brightness variability. The mill also realized that the bleach plant was a bottleneck.
"We weren’t getting as much production out of the plant as we could and we had to address that problem," said Dwight Anderson, Senior Process Control Systems Specialist, Catalyst Paper.
Catalyst Paper investigated several options and turned to Honeywell because of past success in deploying advanced control solutions in the pulp mill. In addition, Honeywell possessed the specific expertise in bleaching technology that Catalyst was looking for.
“We looked at a few options and knew that we wanted to have a way to measure pulp brightness and residual bleaching chemical concentrations in-line and Honeywell had the sensors to accomplish this as part of a closed-loop control package,” said Anderson.
Honeywell’s Advanced TMP Bleaching Control package is a fully customizable solution that helps to streamline the efficiencies of bleach plant operations. The package is also designed with complete integration of advanced technologies, including in-line sensors and constrained MPC technology. This comprehensive package is able to accommodate the complex dynamics of the bleach plant and provides the algorithms to directly define business objectives, such as reducing chemical consumption, directly into the control strategy.
“Our company had done some beta testing in another part of the plant with Honeywell so there was not only the cost benefit of doing business with them in addition to the expertise, but also the invaluable experience in having an ongoing relationship with Honeywell’s pulp and paper group,” said Anderson.
Implemented in three phases, the Elk Falls bleach plant automation project included:
Completed over about six months in 2005, Catalyst Paper realized significant monetary and time savings benefits as well as increased throughput and better pulp quality.
Concluded Anderson, “The key to our solution was that Honeywell spent a lot of time listening to our operators, and had an idea of the roadblocks that might be encountered along the way. The engineers didn’t just give us a cookie cutter implementation but something that was customized to our Elk Falls facility in order to maintain its competitive advantage – this is the real strength of Honeywell.
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