Evaporators, The Place To Look For Energy And Water Usage Reductions, 2015 PEERS Conference

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Evaporators are at the heart of the pulp mill. How well they operate will have a strong influence on production capacity and cost, energy use and production, water requirements and effluent disposal costs. Every ton of pulp produced requires the evaporation of 7 to 8 tons of water from the black liquor to burn it the recovery boiler, with most of water recovered in the form of condensate. Proper segregation of this condensate can allow a large fraction to be returned to process. Good working evaporators help the mill maximize solids processing capacity, reduction efficiency and steam generation from the recovery boiler. With rising energy cost and the potential to sell excess power from the pulp mill as “green” energy, the evaporators represent one of the areas of the mill where significant savings and additional revenue generation can be achieved. Valmet is the largest supplier of new evaporator trains worldwide and has applied technology advances resulting from these projects to a large number of evaporator plant upgrades. This paper will cover several typical evaporator upgrades and, through case studies, show the benefits achieved by the mill in terms of energy savings, increased condensate reuse and increased evaporation capacity.