World’s largest ‘smart’ pulp mill in Chile

The world’s largest ‘smart’ pulping mill has been built by Celulosa Arauco at Nueva Aldea in central Chile. Digital automation by Emerson Process Management allows mill personnel to readily access more data, allowing for easier calibration and greater mill-wide visibility, efficiency and management.

Celulosa Arauco is one of the world’s largest forestry companies measured by plantation area and production of Kraft wood pulp and sawn timber and wood panels. The pulp mill construction project represents an approximate US$850 million capital investment.

Using its PlantWeb architecture, Emerson digitally automated the entire smart mill, resulting in an unusually fast start-up while meeting Arauco’s critical goals of environmental protection and personnel safety, and quality production.

“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.

“We chose PlantWeb digital architecture because we wanted the most modern technology available for our plant to speed up the calibration and start-up phases,” added Erazo. “The entire plant was optimised from wood feed at the front end to pulp shipment at the back end, which substantially reduces costs and start-up times. 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.

“Despite the huge scope of this project, it was completed on time largely due to the excellent support we received from Emerson,” said Gunars Luks Guzman, mill manager of the Nueva Aldea mill. “We were successful in achieving all of our objectives. The plant is designed to turn out 856,000 tonnes of Kraft pulp a year. 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.”

Emerson automation and service experts from Argentina and Chile worked with Celulosa Arauco to provide a completely integrated smart mill solution built around PlantWeb digital architecture, including DeltaV systems and Foundation Fieldbus networking. Emerson 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. This proved valuable in efficiently integrating the work of a number of suppliers.

Training, simulation, start-up and commissioning were managed through Emerson and Arauco teamwork. Pre-start-up offline 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 a tremendous assistance in 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 be much more productive.”

Digital technology enabled centralised access to all mill data, while wireless networks enabled technicians to roam the mill doing local testing, all contributing to flexibly and reduction in commissioning time.

“Celulosa Arauco has taken advantage of the latest digital technology to achieve the highest operating performance mill with the best possible environmental performance, safety and throughput,” said Leo Rodriquez, president of Emerson Latin America. “The success of this project demonstrates that building your facility with digital automation architecture will deliver unprecedented project benefits including lower risk, shorter project cycle and lower total installed cost, plus provide a platform for benchmark setting operational performance.”

The PlantWeb solution integrates 3300 Foundation Fieldbus devices, including Rosemount flow, level, pressure and temperature instruments, and Fisher valves with Fisher Fieldvue digital valve controllers. Predictive diagnostics information is collected from intelligent devices throughout the mill by AMS Suite, which delivers alarms and data to operations and maintenance personnel.

The PlantWeb solution controls more than 2100 Rockwell E3 and E3+ motor control centres (MCCs) through DeviceNet, more than 3500 discrete remote I/O points through Profibus DP, and more than 340 variable speed drives though Profibus DP. It also connects with more than 15 PLCs through Profibus DP and special analysers through Modbus.

Emerson Process Management
www.ap.emersonprocess.com