Refining zone temperature control: a good choice for pulp quality control?

Paper in proceeding, 2009

The results presented in this work show that it is not motivated to use the specific energy for controlling pulp quality in terms of CSF and MFL. This statement is based on the fact that it gives limited dynamic information of the refining process besides what already is given by the three traditional process variables, i.e. production rate, dilution water flow, and hydraulic pressure when predicting CSF and MFL by using ARMAX modeling procedures. Whereas, using the refining zone temperature measurements as inputs to the ARMAX models results in a significant improvement of the ability to predict these pulp quality variables. From a control perspective, this implies that refining zone temperature control is preferable to any concepts based on specific energy when it comes to minimization of pulp quality variations.