Sodium Model for Production Planning in a Paper Mill

In today’s pulp and paper industry the Kraft process is the most common method for pulp production. This method uses sodium based chemicals (white liquor) in the cooking process to remove lignin from the wood chips and create pulp. The remains from this process is called black liquor and is being sent to a recycling system for the purpose of recovering the cooking chemicals. Evaporation of black liquor is a big part of this recycling, and the evaporation plant consists of many different tanks that stores black liquor. At Smurfit Kappa Piteå a model has previously been created for the purpose of production planning. In this work the opportunity to add a part that simulates how the liquor stock in the chemical recovery system will change based on the planned production was investigated. This was done by estimating the amount of dry black liquor in the tanks through inflows and outflows. A formula for the produced black liquor was also developed. The results showed that simulating tank levels separately was difficult as data was lacking in some key areas. The final model is therefore a simplified version that estimates the total amount of dry black liquor in the evaporation plant. It simulates the black liquor buffer based on the planed production and how it will change over five days. This could be done with an error smaller than 6%, compared to measurements from sensors in the black liquor tanks. Attempts were also made to create similar models for the rest of the chemical recovery system. It was concluded that information about the inflow of green and white liquor has to be further investigated in order to implement these in the production planning model.