Drumming up big smiles at Alier

1st new generation FibreFlow® Drum pulper for an OCC line in Europe

Ask Pilar Carnicé“Paper quality remained the same. The only difference I could see was less variability after the Drum was installed.”
Pilar Carnicé, Quality Control Manager of Alier S.A. when the new FibreFlow^® Drum pulper from ANDRITZ started up. Based on her test data, she cannot tell you.

Carnicé, the mill’s QC Manager, knows the date of course: after all, it was an important investment. “But, if you look at the paper test resultsPilar Carnicé performs a paper tensile strength test., you cannot see a change,” she says. “Concurra tests for carton, tensile tests for sacks, tensile and ply bond tests for gypsum – all the tests show no variability.”

A big disappointment to Alier’s top management? “No, not at all,” says CEO Florentino Nespereira“From day one, there were no concerns about the Drum. Within a month, we were able to substitute lower quality raw materials to help with our cost structure.”
Florentino Nespereira, Chief Executive Officer. “We celebrate it as a big success.”

Okay. Perhaps we are missing something here? There must be more to the story.

 35-40 different furnish qualities

“It’s no mystery really,” says Nespereira. “We are a 100% recycled mill and we produce a wide range of products from 50-450 g/m². We use a very wide range of wastepaper qualities, including liquid packaging board. When we use lower cost raw materials and maintain the quality our customers expect, we improve our margin. And, when we use considerably less energy and improve our productivity, we reduce costs further. This we have been able to do with the FibreFlow^® Drum.”

When asked to quantify the economics, Technical Director José Pulido“With five old batch pulpers, the pulping area had become a production bottleneck which affected the stability of our operations. Also, the energy costs were also extremely high.”
José Pulido, Technical Director is a little hesitant. “Let’s just say that we had five batch pulpers that were old,” he says. “Maintenance and repair was a daily activity. Three high-consistency pulpers used about 45-50 kWh per tonne. Two low-consistency pulpers cut plastics in furnish very small bits that were difficult to remove downstream.  

“Compare that to today where the Fibre Flow^® DrumThe FibreFlow^® Drum processing line at Alier. consumes less than half that energy. Plastics and other contaminants come out whole. We get continuous production up to 750 t/d without much variability, even when substituting lower cost furnishes. And, we still keep our quality high.”

 Harder, but more opportunities

Being a 100% recycle millAbout 30-40 different grades of wastepaper are processed into a variety of paper products at the mill. with dozens of end products, and even more grades of incoming furnish to manage, Alier has done a masterful job of managing the complexities and opportunities it faces. “At times,” Nespereira says, “this makes our life harder, but also gives us more possibilities.”

Alier, near Lleida in Spain, is small by international standards. Nespereira sees this as an asset. “We are very close to our customers and markets,” he says. “We are nimble and not afraid to try new things if we believe it will help our customers. Of course, with our size, we can’t afford to make big mistakes.”

Nespereira is a mechanical engineer by training who rose through the ranks of Sonae (the largest private employer in Portugal) for 20 years before being recruited to Alier in 2002. His experience is varied (production, start-ups, logistics, and general management), which gives him a good foundation for managing the complexities of Alier.

The product mix at Alier consists of various types of packaging papers (40-50%), sack papers (20%), gypsum papers (20%), and paper for shopping bags (10%). “Our strategy is to grow in the sack, gypsum, and paper bag segments,” Nespereira says. “With a new large 400,000 t/a machine being announced every year in the corrugated segment, it is clear that over time we will not be competitive.”

A big push in helping to make the grade change to the new niche segments was Alier’s investment in the pulp preparation area.

 Improving the satellites

Five years ago, Alier began a program to improve what Nespereira calls the “satellite” areas of the mill. “We started by improving our water treatment system, then the pulp screening and cleaning area, and then debottlenecking the machine itself,” he says.

By 2007-2008, the focus shifted to the pulping area. “In our opinion, this was clearly the worst area for our mill,” says Pulido. “We had five pulpers, two low-consistency and three high-consistency. Each was a different model and from a different period, but on average they were 20-30 years old. This area not only became a production bottleneck in terms of capacity, but we had significant problems with maintenance, which affected the stability of our operations. Also, the energy costs were also extremely high.”

The three HC pulpers required steam and chemicals. Specific energy consumption was in the range of 45-50 kWh/t of production. In addition, one of the pulpers was dedicated to a specific raw material. “If the pulper was down for repair, we had to switch the product on our paper machine to accommodate this,” Pulido explains. “This caused disruptions in the stability of our process.”

The team at AlierFrom left to right: Kimmo Vanhala, ANDRITZ Fibre Flow^® Drum Product Manager; José Pulido, Alier’s Technical Director; Enrique Navarrette, recently retired Mill Manager at Alier; Florentino Nespereira, Alier’s CEO, and José Corominola of Copapres, ANDRITZ’S local representative. came to the conclusion to purchase a continuous pulper that would be dedicated to producing pulp for 70-80% of its product mix, and to keep two out of the five batch pulpers for other specific products. “Even though the cost of a continuous pulper is higher than the traditional batch units, we wanted to get out of this nightmare of having to maintain five old pulpers,” says Nespereira. “The critical issues for us at the beginning were low maintenance and low energy consumption.”

Pulido is a 36-year veteran of Alier, first starting in the electrical maintenance department. Over the years, he has worked in virtually every department. Today, he is responsible for new projects and optimization activities. “When I first became involved with the project, I have to admit that I didn’t know ANDRITZ,” he says. “But after some conversations with José Corominola, ANDRITZ’s sales agent in Spain, and some meetings with their technical people, I became convinced that ANDRITZ had the simpler, more effective, and less costly solution. They also demonstrated to us that we could move to lower cost furnishes and still achieve our quality targets.”

Pulido and his colleagues visited an installation of the FibreFlow^® Drum that has been operating 10+ years at Stora Enso (Barcelona). “We were impressed with the equipment construction and the reliability of the system.”

Alier signed the contract with ANDRITZ in April 2008 and the line started up in August 2009.

 Smooth project

The erection went very well, but the biggest problem was in transport of the Drum itself from Finland. It left the workshop on time, but according to Nespereira, “everything was great until the truck got to the Spanish border. There we discovered that there is not one Spain, but 17 different Spains when it comes to getting permits to transport such a large piece of equipment (31.6 m long by 4.7 m in diameter) over the Spanish roads. Each community had to give a permit. This process took time.”

Still, Alier is pleased with the overall project execution and the choice of local subcontractors for ANDRITZ’s EPC delivery. The Drum started up easily with no problems.

 Slushing and screening

The FibreFlow^® Drum pulper has two zones inside it: one to gently slush and defiberize wastepaper and one to remove trash and major contaminants from the pulp. Over 200 Drums have been sold worldwide.

The Drum defiberizes wastepaper by gentle dropping and rolling actions. There are no moving parts inside and nothing to cut the fiber, so strength properties are retained. This also avoids disintegration of the contaminants.

According to Kimmo Vanhala“The new generation design is better at deflaking and defiberizing hard-to-pulp wastepaper furnishes.”
Kimmo Vanhala, FibreFlow^® Drum Product Manager at ANDRITZ, inspects the screening zone of the Drum., ANDRITZ’s FibreFlow^® Drum Product Manager, the Drum has been on the market for 30 years.  The applications experience has resulted in new enhancements for hard-to-pulp wastepapers sometimes found in OCC lines. “This Drum design is better at deflaking and defiberizing difficult furnishes,” Vanhala says. “It still retains the benefits of all FibreFlow^® systems: gentle pulping action, efficient trash removal, and low energy consumption.”

 Noteworthy results

“From day one, there were no concerns about the capacity of the drum, the quality of the pulp, and the consumption of energy,” Nespereira says. “All these things were accomplished very easily, without taking months to fine-tune. Within a month, we were able to substitute lower-quality raw materials to help with our cost structure.

“This substitution of raw materials and elimination of chemicals in the pulping process contributes around 2/3 of the annual savings. Yet energy savings are also significant.”

“When running at design capacity, energy consumption is less than 20 kW/t,” says Pulido. “This is half of what we consumed with the HC batch pulpers.”

According to Pulido, operators easily adapted to the Drum and find it easy to handle. “Everything is automatic,” Pulido says. “The operator only needs to set the production setpoint and the Drum does the rest.”