SCA is a leading global forest products company based in Sundsvall, Sweden. They boast one of the largest production lines for bleached softwood sulfate pulp in the world at Östrand and have recently built a new fiberline to increase production as well as leverage ABB Industrial Software to increase operating efficiency.
Process control is critical for efficient fiberline production. It plays a major role in determining the quality of product delivered and at what cost. Manufacturing in pulp and paper, and more specifically the fiberline process is a highly dynamic, multivariable interacting system, difficult to control as a human operator with only the traditional distributed control system (DCS) or programmable logic controller (PLC).
Due to changes in feed sources, coupled with complex pulping processes, manual operators with PID control tend to remain at “safe distances” from process constraints. ABB’s Advanced Process Control (APC) solution, ABB Ability™ Expert Optimizer tackles the complexity of fiberline control, minimizes the effect of variability in feed and drives the process in the direction that increases operating efficiency and production.
The installation topology allows it to be deployed both inside ABB’s 800xA control system and on top of third-party control systems, making it applicable to any type of control system setup. The benefit of integration inside ABB’s 800xA is that there is easier navigation to the APC applications, PID loops, model predictive control trends and function blocks, with a similar look and feel as the rest of the operator user interface. One of the SCA plants located in Sweden, worked with ABB to increase operating efficiency by leveraging Expert Optimizer to reduce "off-spec" or "reject" pulp by keep all quality parameters on target even during disturbances. The primary focus being the bleaching and oxygen delignification processes.