Tight control of raw green liquor total titratable alkali (TTA) may be considered an important first step towards improving the overall economic performance of the causticizing process. Dissolving tank control is made difficult by the fact that the unknown smelt flow is highly variable and subject to runoff. High TTA variability negatively impacts operational costs through increased scaling in the dissolver and transfer lines, increased deadload in the liquor cycle, under- and over-liming, increased energy consumption, and increased maintenance. Current practice is to use feedback control to regulate the TTA to a target value through manipulation of weak wash flow while simultaneously keeping dissolver density within acceptable limits. Unfortunately, the amount of variability reduction that can be achieved by feedback control alone is fundamentally limited by the process dynamics. One way to improve upon the situation would be to measure the smelt flow and use it as a feedforward control variable. Direct measurement of smelt flow is not yet possible. The use of an indirect measurement, the dissolver vent stack temperature, is investigated in this paper as a surrogate feedforward variable for dissolving tank TTA control. Mill trials indicate that significant variability reduction in the raw green liquor TTA is possible and that the control improvements carry through to the downstream processes.
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