Use of Electrical Resistance Tomography for characterising flow and assessing mixing quality of Pulp & Paper manufacturing processes

Multiphase systems found in pulp and paper process operations are often opaque, therefore difficult to monitor using conventional technologies and a good understanding of mixing quality is important as this is an essential unit operation in the pulp and paper industry.

ITS’s Electrical Resistance (ERT) and Fast Impedance Tomography (EIT) instrumentation is being used for the characterisation of a wide range of Pulp & Paper operations at the Pulp & Paper Centre and in the department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of British Columbia.

One of UBC research team recently published some results in "The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering, Volume 9999, 2011".

Wisarn Yenjaichon, from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in Vancouver wrote:

"Mixing is used for blending pulp in stock chests, controlling consistency in pulp processing, attenuating high-frequency variations in consistency before paper machines, and mixing chemicals into pulp suspensions in bleaching stages. Without good mixing, operation costs can be higher due to unstable production and poor product quality. The results show that ERT can be used to evaluate industrial-scale mixer performance and to monitor the changes in the mixing quality as a function of process operating conditions."*

Temporal variation of mixing index as suspension flow rate changed from 390 to 225 L/s at Cm =3.5%.**

ITS z8000 DAS and sensors are used for this research.

* Ref: W.Yenjaichon, G. Pageau, M.Bhole , C.P.J Bennington and J.R Grace (2011) Assessment of mixing quality for an industrial pulp mixer using electrical resistance tomography, The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering, Vol. 9999, pp1-9

**Courtesy of the University of British Columbia
 
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