Mid Sweden University

In this work, high-rate fibre analysis has been used for direct feedback control of pulp quality by application of a new control strategy for a two-stage refining process in the Holmen Hallsta mill, Sweden. The application is based on control of pulp freeness, estimated from the continuous fibre analysis results from a BTG Single Point Morphology ana-lyzer. The goal was to create a robust and simple control strategy. The new strategy includes control of plate gap, con-sistency and the hydraulic force difference between the stages. Expressed as standard deviation, the freeness and av-erage fibre length variations were reduced by 50% and 25% respectively. The small size of the pulp chest in this process also benefits stronger feedback control. Long-term operation suggest that high-rate fibre analysis can be used to reduce faster quality variation.

In this study, the effect of process- and online analyser configuration on pulp quality control is explored. The following parameters were included: analyser sampling interval, time delay, measurement error magnitude, and latency chest residence time. Using different values of parameters in a process model, a range of configurations were constructed. For each configuration, the achievable control performance was evaluated using an optimization approach. PI controller settings were chosen based on minimization of the integrated absolute error (IAE) in pulp quality after an input step disturbance. The results show that reducing the sampling interval improves performance also when the interval is smaller than the chest residence time or the analyser delay. Moreover, reducing the chest residence time can reduce the IAE by up to 40 %. However, reducing the residence time to lower than 1/3 of the sampling interval does not improve performance. Further improvement is possible if the analyser delay is reduced. The compromise between reducing the IAE and avoiding creating variation by acting on measurement error has a strong influence on the results. In conclusion, pulp quality control performance can be improved significantly by making changes to the studied configuration parameters.