World's largest “smart” pulp mill starts up

Nueva Aldea, Chile - Celulosa Arauco has started the operation of what is claimed to be the world’s largest “smart” pulping mill. The $850-million facility, at Nueva Aldea in central Chile, features digital automation that allows mill personnel ready access more data, allowing for easier calibration and greater mill-wide visibility, efficiency, and management.

Celulosa Arauco worked with Emerson Process Management  to provide an integrated 'smart mill' built around Emerson's PlantWeb digital architecture, including DeltaV systems, and Foundation fieldbus networking. The digital technology enabled centralised access to all mill data, while wireless networks enabled technicians to roam the mill doing local testing, all contributing to flexibility and reduction in commissioning time.

The plant is designed to turn out 856 kilotonnes of Kraft pulp a year, said said Gunars Luks Guzman, mill manager of the Nueva Aldea mill. "In only six months after start-up, we had reached 93.8% of that target on a monthly basis, and have since ramped up to full production according to plan,” he stated.

“We automated the whole plant from the moment we feed the logs into the chipper until a bale of pulp emerges at the end,” said Alejandro Erazo, distributed control systems project engineer for Arauco. “Our objective was to use the most modern technology in the market and use it in the best way possible, to make each part of the project easier, from engineering to configuration to start-up of the plant.”

The entire plant was optimised from wood feed at the front end to pulp shipment at the back end, said  Erazo. "The calibration time of each instrument was reduced by one-third and configuring motor control centres for 30 motors now takes half a day or so rather than two weeks to a month as was the case without intelligent motor controls. Valve configuration time has also been substantially reduced. On previous projects we typically spent half a day trying to move the valve to the chosen setpoint. Today all we have to do is push a button and it self-calibrates."

Emerson also wrote a Functional Description Specification (FDS) for managing the automation of the project. Arauco delivered the FDS to vendors who returned their digital configuration data for entry into the DeltaV digital automation system. Training, simulation, start-up and commissioning were managed through Emerson and Arauco teamwork. Pre-start-up off-line testing using complete high fidelity simulation of the operating pulp mill by the DeltaV system, enabled validation of operations and configuration across all vendor equipment, avoiding trouble at start-up.

“DeltaV provides a communications architecture that allows us to interconnect devices of many different manufacturers and protocols,” said Mauricio Quintana, systems supervisor at the Nueva Aldea mill. “This was of tremendous assistance to the project and will allow us to integrate new devices in the future. Emerson’s AMS Suite helps us to make accurate diagnoses of instrument faults. It helps our maintenance staff to be much more productive.”