Performance booster - FIBER GPS™

The shortest route to fiber quality

Innovative GPS navigates shortest route to fiber quality at lowest cost. Like your smartphone's GPS can guide you almost anywhere in the world, the "papermaking GPS" guides you in making the right choices about fiber mix, applied energy, and paper quality. It’s significantly reducing trial and error on your machine and saving time and money.

“Fiber GPS™ has an optimization-assist mode that guides operators to a best-case scenario in terms of cost and quality.”

PETER ANTENSTEINER

Vice President LC Refining

peter.antensteiner@andritz.com

While it is true that papermakers have considerably more data today to help them navigate their processes, there are still some blind spots. For example, in the stock preparation area even experienced papermakers are “flying blind” in refiner operation. Operator screens do not show how a change in applied power or fiber mix affects stock quality in the machine chest. One way to describe the operational settings that produce paper within specification is to run trials with different fibers, additives, and applied power settings and then to determine the corresponding effect on quality. However, on-machine trials can be risky and expensive, and off-machine trials can be inconclusive since the actual production equipment is not used.

BRINGING LIGHT INTO THE DARKNESS

The days of flying blind are now over. ANDRITZ Fiber GPS, a software based simulation and optimization tool, brings light into the darkness and allows papermakers to look into stock preparation refiners while in operation,

Fiber GPS is the evolution of the earlier simulation tool with fiber quality data models. Instead of focusing only on refining process parameters, Fiber GPS utilizes a statistical quality model, which combines these parameters with fiber quality data. This model uses pulp quality data representing intrinsic fiber quality features such as length, chemical surface composition, and fines content, as well as information about “refinability,” to calculate fiber qualities of refined pulp mixtures.

By simulating the complete stock preparation area, Fiber GPS allows the user to “deep-dive” into the fiber quality customization process.

“Savings opportunities are boundless! When market prices for different fiber sources rise, Fiber GPS can reduce total cost of ownership by suggesting a cheaper mix. Also, sophisticated algorithms behind Fiber GPS provide reliable fiber quality prediction over several stages of refining as well as mixing of different refining lines – a true breakthrough” concludes Peter Antensteiner.

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TIME to give your mill a FIBER BOOST?

Boost the performance of your mill to go the extra mile and succeed in the highly demanding world of pulp making.

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