ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a general overview of control engineering in the pulp and paper industry in the mid 1990s. Paper products are manufactured primarily from wood in pulp and paper mills which are large, industrial complexes, each containing thousands of control loops. The manufacture of pulp and paper products represents a particularly challenging environment for the control engineer, as it is large in scale, highly nonlinear, highly stochastic, and dominated by time delays. Pulp and paper mills, like most of heavy industry, have been designed only in steady state. Regardless of the imperfections which might exist in the pulp and paper manufacturing environment, the marketplace demands ever greater product uniformity. Warnings and recommendations about control performance and control engineering skill have been reported in pulp and paper industry literature. Final paper product measurements include: basis weight, moisture content, caliper, smoothness, gloss, opacity, color, and brightness.
