Digital recovery boiler

Purpose and goal

Acosense, Fraunhofer Chalmers Centre and Nordic Papper Bäckhammar have identified a potential 10% increase in efficiency, with huge economic profit. With the help of Acosense instruments, both the fingerprint of the black liquor as well as the fingerprint of the injection into the recovery boiler was detected. Changes in the system were detected and confirmed as valuable information by an experienced operator. The necessary requirements for a full-scale project were identified to create a digital tool to run the recovery boiler at maximum efficiency.

Expected results and effects

The pre-study gave a clear description of which prerequisites there are in order to succeed with a full-scale project. The pre-study includes a report from Fraunhofer Chalmers Centre regarding changes in the system and correlation to other system parameters of the recovery boiler as well as an Acosense report about the savings that can be achieved with a system like that. The pre-study made clear what is needed in order to succeed with a project that can generate an approximate 10% increase in efficiency of the recovery boiler.

Planned approach and implementation

Acosense installed two systems that created the data for Fraunhofer Chalmers Centres (FCC) data analysis. The collected data was correlated with about 100 parameters of the recovery boiler that are used today to control it. Significant deviations were discussed with an experienced operator at Nordic Paper Bäckhammar (NPB) to identify the root cause to those changes and if the information is of value to optimise the recovery boiler. A phenomenon called flashing, where droplets causing scaling, was identified and confirmed by the operator together with the root cause.