Siemens Energy AB initiates collaboration with Heat Management regarding energy efficiency improvements in black liquor boilers on pulp mills. The collaboration applies to a common platform that enables safe overlapping operation of sootblowers based on Simatic PCS7 SIPAPER DCS- environment.

It involves a patented solution for optimizing the sootblowers, which are generally operated non-stop to keep the flue gas path clean and to prevent fouling and sintering of accumulations on heat transfer surfaces. In many cases the operation of the existing sootblower system is not enough, resulting downtime for manual cleaning. The optimization can increase sootblowing capacity by 100 %, without installing more sootblowers or steam headers. By introducing a local control on each sootblower steam valve, existing sootblowers can be upgraded to one-way soot blowing, without taking the boiler off-line and disrupting the chemical recovery process. During boiler shutdown, the control system is upgraded to achieve overlapping operation of sootblowers. The technology constitutes a step-change in sootblowing technology, doubling the capacity (starts per day) without installing more sootblowers or consuming more steam.

By optimizing the sootblowers the following can be obtained:

• Up to 50 % reduced steam consumption of the steam sootblowers
• Doubling the sootblowing frequency
• A combination of the above

The optimization of the sootblowers is often accompanied by a study using big data analysis software. Studying operational data will reveal which heat exchangers need the most cleaning and will quantify the benefits, e.g. how much the average steam temperature can be increased by soot blowing more frequently in the most problematic areas.