“Honeywell’s Da Vinci Quality Control System will enable Catalyst Paper’s Powell River mill to improve product quality and production efficiency from its three paper machines by using a common interface and display across the board. We installed a retrofitted scanner in a twelve-hour machine downtime and were in control in less than four hours. I challenge anybody to do better.”
Bill Cheetham, Process Control Specialist, Catalyst Paper
After 30 years it was time to upgrade the control system at Catalyst Paper’s Powell River mill. After some research into the best way to update its three machines at the mill, Catalyst Paper selected Honeywell’s Da Vinci™ Quality Control System (QCS). With its comprehensive suite of online sensors, combined with fast scanner and data processing speeds, Da Vinci delivers precise, high-resolution measurements.
One of the specific features of this plan was to coordinate Honeywell’s release of Model 8900 Intellinode and Drivetrain Retrofit Kits with the availability of PM9’s scanner for retrofit. This lowered Catalyst’s investment by leveraging older scanner assets. Significant benefits realized by the Powell River mill include:
Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, Catalyst Paper is a leading producer of mechanical 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 at sites 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.
The Powell River Division, located on the mainland coast of British Columbia, produces newsprint and uncoated mechanical specialty papers on three paper machines. These papers are used in catalogues, magazines, newsletters, inserts, flyers and high-volume weekend newspaper magazines.
Catalyst Paper had to update its Powell River mill and find a way to leapfrog scanning technology and achieve better performance than with its 30-year-old technology. At the same time the company wanted to take advantage of its current legacy systems and get as much out of its older technology as possible to extend the life of some of its key assets.
“We were looking at a 30-year-old scanning system that was unreliable and had spare parts issues,” said Bill Cheetham, Process Control Specialist, Catalyst Paper. “We were also looking at anywhere between two and five minute delays before we could get the machine even started in the right direction, because that is how long it took to get scan numbers back – totally unresponsive.”
Catalyst Paper investigated several options and turned to Honeywell. The Powell River mill was already a Honeywell control system user and worked with Honeywell when it looked to standardize and run all three paper machines on the Da Vinci QCS.
“As operators move from machine to machine they need to be able to see the same thing. When our instruments mechanics get called to a problem on a machine it doesn’t matter whether it is machine 9, 10 or 11--they see the same equipment. Because of this, the training becomes easier and you can relate issues you may have on one machine to another,” said Cheetham.
The foundation of Honeywell’s Da Vinci QCS is the application server which runs the performance controls and supports the Precision Platform scanners and Precision Measurement sensors. Together, these can provide the following:
In addition, Model 8900 Intellinode and Drivetrain Retrofit Kits upgrade certain MXOpen scanners to the same performance as current Da Vinci Precision Platform scanners. Existing mill assets are leveraged with improved ROI.
Concluded Cheetham, “Basically, we were able to justify this project as a new scanner for one of our machines and the side benefit was we could upgrade this older frame to the same technology level as the other two machines. We extended the life of our assets and took something that was near extinction and extended the service life for a few more years.”
Da Vinci™ is a trademark of Honeywell International Inc.