Modeling and Simulation of an Oxygen Delignification Industrial Process of Cellulosic Pulp using Kinetic Expressions and the software CADSIM Plus

The Brazilian productive sector of pulp and paper represents a relevant contribution for the development of Brazil. To increase the competitiveness of Brazilian companies to an international level, products must have high standards of quality and high added value. Thus, the mathematical modeling and simulation of industrial processes ensures the stability of production. This study presents the fit of mathematical models for the Oxygen Delignification process of eucalyptus pulp of the industry Klabin Monte Alegre. The mathematical model estimates the kappa number after the reactor, based on two kinetic models given by the literature, one of these models considers oxygen excess in the reaction medium. The models showed a mean relative error of 10 %. The adjustment of the kinetic parameters equations was done in Matlab software, using classical methods of optimization, such as BFGS, DFP, Steepest Descent, Gauss Newton, Simplex and Levenberg Marquardt. The models were incorporated in the commercial simulator CADSIM Plus to provide an optimization tool to the pulp industries. The simulator predicts the kappa number after the Oxygen Delignification reactor. The results of the phenomenological models indicate that possibly there is excess of oxygen in the reaction media. Only the model that considered the presence of the oxygen in the kinetic equation was able to be implemented in the simulator CADSIM Plus, generating consistent results, with an absolute error of ± 2 kappa number. Application: The kinetic model applied to the CADSIM Plus software in this study may be used to optimize the Oxygen Delignification process either by reducing chemical consumptions or by testing different process conditions without changing production.