Dynamic Simulation of a Paper Mill in View of Analysing the Effects of Circuit Closure, 2000 Engineering Conference Proceedings

Jean-Baptiste Vassas, Martine Rueff--For a long period of time, paper mills have been considered as important sources of pollution. The new trends, which consist in closing the circuits, enable the papermakers to reduce the consumption of fresh water, but result in an increase of the internal pollution. The objective of our work was to develop a dynamic simulator, capable of representing any paper mill, in view of analyzing the effects of circuit closure. This development was divided in three main stages. The two first stages consisted in choosing the variables to simulate and modeling the unit operations of the papermaking process from stock preparation to the end of the wet section. The last step was the development of a toolbox for simulating these operations, using a commercial software, and creating a user-friendly interface. Thus, this dynamic and modular simulator enables us to test the effects of mill operation or circuit design on the evolution of consistencies, flow rates, etc, in the mill and analyze their impact on environment.