Information management aids paper mill savings

The Exaquantum plant information management system has enabled operational expense savings of more than $2 million for the operators of one of the world's largest paper mills

The Exaquantum plant information management system (PIMS) has enabled operational expense savings of more than $2 million for the operators of one of the world's largest paper mills, Celulose Nipo-Brasileira (Cenibra), and more are expected.

The plant is amongst Brazil's most important producers of paper, currently producing 940kt of eucalyptus bleached pulp per annum.

The factory is based in Belo Oriente, Minas Gerais State, Brazil.

Production began in 1977 and has steadily increased to its current level.

Nigel Bowden, Yokogawa GMSC Managing Director explains: "The company has been a user of Yokogawa distributed control systems (DCS) for many years, initially with a Centum XL, now upgraded to the current Centum CS3000".

"When the company needed a PIMS in 2002 Yokogawa was evaluated and Cenibra management chose the Exaquantum PIMS application with a requirement for 7500 tags and 25 concurrent clients".

Since its introduction in January 2004, Exaquantum has repaid for itself many times over.

There have been three main quantifiable benefits.

First, prior to the installation of Exaquantum the plant suffered repeatedly from blockages in the initial digester unit requiring almost the whole line to be stopped while the digester was unblocked.

Based on the gathering of data and by cross-variable analysis, Cenibra has been able to determine the root cause of problem and reduce the level of digester blockage by a factor of six.

This has resulted in additional production worth $60,000 per annum.

Secondly, chlorine dioxide is a necessary and expensive chemical additive to the bleaching process.

Through historical data analysis, Cenibra has a better understanding of the relationship between the level of ClO2 and pulp quality.

As a result, Cenibra has been able to reduce its ClO2 consumption by 12.8%, resulting in annual savings of $1.2 million.

Thirdly, Exaquantum has enabled Cenibra to quantify the energy balance involved in its processes.

As a result the company has been able to reduce its heat input, saving 7500t of oil per month, equivalent to $570,000 per year.

Later in 2004, a multidisciplinary team of five staff from Cenibra developed a prototype key performance indicator (KPI) system.

This was based on standard Exaquantum/Excel access interface and produced calculations for two key areas - loop control assessment and machinery assessment.

The success of this prototype led to Cenibra to commissioning an intelligent KPI management application in an integrated web environment.

This application can receive tags from Exaquantum, produce KPI calculations and then return its scripts back to the PIMS in the form of native calc tags.

Exaquantum is then able output these results to operators and engineering staff using its web graphics interface.

The results are also fed back to the Centum DCSs to control the production system.

Cenibra has recently extended its Exaquantum system from 7500 to 20,000 tags and 41 concurrent users.

Software and hardware were smoothly upgraded last March (2005).

The increase was required to accommodate utilities and recovery boiler plants, as well as to cater for increased productive capacity currently being developed.

The key reason for the increased number of tags in Exaquantum is the development of additional applications on top of the historian database.

The bulk of such increase comes from calculated tags, which Cenibra is producing to help generate control assessment KPIs, production KPIs, equipment assessment KPIs and others.

Bowden adds: "The plant management team had extensive experience of the Yokogawa Centum DCSs which gave them confidence in Yokogawa products and supporting service".

"Yokogawa and Cenibra worked very closely together to produce the outstanding savings that have been achieved".

"They flow from three key factors".

"One, the system requirements were taken carefully, involving the correct stakeholders of each area, bearing in mind that MES functionalities are highly customised and scattered in terms of usage over the whole enterprise structure".

"Two, the utilisation of a multidisciplinary approach, involving customer personnel from different areas, such as process engineering, IT, quality control, laboratory and maintenance engineering".

"And, three, a high level of partnership was established between Yokogawa and Cenibra right from the initial system conception through design and implementation".

"This close co-operation continues, with Yokogawa providing ongoing consultancy".

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