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Bulletin No. 6

December 2005

NSERC Environmental Design Engineering Chair

Page 8 PROCESS INTEGRATION IN THE PULP AND PAPER INDUSTRY Page 1 PROCESS INTEGRATION IN THE PULP AND PAPER INDUSTRY

Despite the difficult times that our industry is currently enduring, we are excited to report that our NSERC Environmental Design Engineering Chair has been renewed for an additional 5 years through to December 2010! This is great news,

and we hope a reflection of the important work we are addressing in the Chair. Indeed, it is something of an exciting time in the Chair, as the first Chair term winds-up and many of our talented graduate students write their theses. Given these unusual circumstances, it is a time to be grateful to our Chair partners, and a time to reflect on the vision for the Chair. First we might reflect on our responsibility. Our industry is closing mills and it is a challenge to see light during these difficult times. However out of the dust must arise a changed and strengthened pulp and paper industry. There are few entities during these times that have the opportunity to look forward to this vision, but the Chair is one of them. We have the responsibility to support the pulp and paper industry in the best way we can - doing pertinent research to assist in cutting costs in the short term, however also to do research which provides inspiration how our industry must change to prosper in the longer term. It is exactly these two themes we are seeking to address with the Chair renewal. We will continue to examine the use of process integration to cut costs and improve productivity, and also to explore the potential for the so-called forest biorefinery. Through our grad students, we also hope to provide the industry with tomorrow’s leaders – and we will need strong leaders to take the industry to its evolved form. Over the last 5 years – the first Chair term – we have completed a wide range of projects in this area, for example examining the use of process simulation for plant-wide optimization, business modeling using advanced cost accounting techniques for operating and design decision-

making, supply chain management techniques using a “bottom-up” or process-based approach, and life cycle assessment

(LCA) to explore for example the implications of increased deink pulp production and the implementation of cogeneration. We learned recently that our paper concerning this latter topic presented at the 91st Annual PAPTAC Meeting has won their 2005 Douglas Jones Environmental Award. For the next five years – the second Chair term which has just been approved – we seek to apply our core competency of process and product systems engineering largely for evaluating how mills can best evolve into the so-called forest biorefinery. We plan to evaluate the energy question globally – in the short term regarding energy efficiency using advanced thermal pinch analysis techniques for plant-wide analysis and for the production of green power, and also over the longer term, by exploring strategies which optimize the carbon value chain from the forest. In this latter case, we seek to use our process and product analysis tools to explore how in addition to pulp and paper products, mills can produce green power and green chemicals. We recognize that the technology base to achieve this is critical, and we have established collaborations globally with those who are developing innovation to achieve this. We also recognize that the supply chain for the products is equally important, and that the “best” biorefinery configuration must be configured to take available (local) markets into account. We hope to identify solutions which if implemented, will take our industry from being marginal to a profitable industry by manufacturing a wider range of green products. Given the ratification of Kyoto and the energy economy, the recent shut-down of inefficient pulp and paper mills, and the need for investment in our remaining mills – I think that the timing for the Chair focus could not be better.

We are excited to have such an exciting mandate placed before us, and look forward to working closely with our partners, and doing our best at responding to this challenge!

Five More Years for the École Polytechnique Design Chair!

Visit our Website: www.pulp-paper.ca

NSERC Environmental Design Engineering Chair École Polytechnique - Montréal P.O. Box 6079, Station. Centre-ville Montreal, (Quebec) Canada - H3C 3A7 Contact: Professor Paul Stuart ,Chairholder Phone: (514) 340-4711 extension 4384 Fax: (514) 340-5150 paul.stuart@polymtl.ca

The Chair has prospered tremendously well over its first five years, in part by clearly defining its vision and expertise, and then collaborating with the best-of-the-best from around the world. We value greatly our collaborations with such universities as Chalmers University of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Texas A&M University, Imperial College of Science and Technology, and many others. We also have important collaborations with software developers such as OSISoft Inc. (PI, SigmaFine), Metso (WinGEMS), UMETRICS (SIMCA-P), and many others. Well, we have a few more exciting collaborations to announce! Chair announces new special partnership with Natural Resources Canada CETC-Varennes Process Integration Team: The Chair is very excited about a new partnership with the expert team in Process Integration, which has expertise in a wide range of industry sectors including pulp and paper, and which emphasizes technology transfer to indus-try. CETC-Varennes emphasizes applied research and tech-nology transfer to industry. Together, the Process Integration Teams at NRCan and École Polytechnique hope to become recognized as a world-class centre of excellence for the application process integration techniques.

Chair welcomes new Chair partner Papier Masson Limited (PML): The Chair is excited to welcome the dynamic team from PML on-board. PML is a “dream come true” for the application of process integration tools: single line TMP, one paper machine, in a highly instrumented state-of-

the-art process! We look forward to finding value in the PML mill data over the next 5 years.

Chair welcomes 3C Software and IMPACT!: Who is 3C Software? We keep seeing them in the trade journals as the supplier-of-choice for cost accounting software. Well, now 3C Software and the Chair have a collaboration for the next 5 years, and students in the Chair are already demonstrating how to use their software to find even more value in the context of both operations and design.

Chair explores future collaboration with UNICAMP (Brazil): Many of us know UNICAMP as the “MIT of Brazil”, and many of us know Professor Rubens Maciel Filho who directs a huge team of graduate students exploring the creation of added-value organic

chemicals from lignocellulosic feedstocks. Could this be interesting for the forest biorefinery? – you bet! We can hardly wait to find the right grant opportunity for an international collaboration.

New Collaborations

"Science has the chance and modesty to know that it is in the provisional one, to move the borders of the unknown and to advance."

Marc Augé - Extract of The World of Education - April 2001

Five more years for the Ecole Polytechnique Design Chair

1

Publications & Presentations The Chair Team in 2005 - New Arrivals

2 2

Soon to be graduated Honors & Awards Also Graduated in 2005

3

2005 Special Events Invited Speakers during 2005

4 & 5 5

Some of the Chair Activities at Pulp & Paper mills The Chair is getting quoted…

6

NAMP-PIECE Programme Alumni Section

7

New Collaborations Thought of the bulletin Last Minute

8 8

Special Insert:

In this Issue:

Last Minute. Congratulations to Michel Perrier who was appointed as the vice-president of the Technical committee on biosystems and bioprocess control of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), an organization that includes around 40 committees concerning all the aspects of automation.

Page 2 PROCESS INTEGRATION IN THE PULP AND PAPER INDUSTRY Page 7 PROCESS INTEGRATION IN THE PULP AND PAPER INDUSTRY

WISING, U., BERNTSSON, T., STUART, P.R., 2005. "The Potential for Energy and Water Savings When Reducing the Water Consumption in a Kraft Pulp Mill ", Applied Thermal Engineering, vol. 25 (2005), pp. 1057-1066.

JANSSEN, M.J.M., CORNEJO, F., RIEMER, K., LAVALLÉE, H.-C., STUART, P.R. 2005, “Techno-Economic Analysis for DIP Production Increase and Implementation of Cogeneration at an Integrated Newsprint Mill”, Proceedings - Pulp and Paper Technical Association of Canada (PAPTAC) 91st Conference, 7-9 Feb. 2005, Montreal, QC, D-707-712. DABROS, M., PERRIER, M., FORBES, F., FAIRBANK, M., STUART, P.R., 2005. «Model-Based Direct Search Optimization of the Broke Recirculation System in a Newsprint Mill», Journal of Cleaner Production.Engineering, vol. 25 (2005), pp. 1057-1066. CORNEJO, F., JANSSEN, M.J.M, GAUDREAULT, C., SAM-SON, R., STUART, P.R., 2005, “Using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a Tool to Enhance Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA)”, Proceedings, PRES’05 - 8th Conference on Process Integration, Modeling and Optimization for Energy Saving and Pollution Reduction, vol. 7, pp. 521-528, (Giardini Naxos, Italy). VIA D., STUART, P.R., PERRIER, M., 2005. "Developing a Dynamic Simulation", Proceedings PRES’05 - 8th Conference on Process Integration, Modelling and Optimisation for Energy Saving and Pollution Reduction, vol. 7, pp. 243-248, (Giardini Naxos, Italy). BELLEC, S., JIANG, T., STUART, P.R. (submitted 2004). “Steady State Identification for On-line Data Reconciliation Based on Wavelet Transform and Filtering”, Computers & Chemical Engineering. WISING, U., BERNTSSON, T., RIEMER, K., STUART, P.R. “Strategic Approach to Cogeneration Design”, Proceedings - PAPTAC 91st Conference, 7-9 Feb. 2005, Montreal, QC., D-699-704. BELLEC, S., JIANG T., STUART P.R., KERR, B. “On-line Proc-essing and Steady-State Reconciliation of Pulp and Paper Mill Process Data”, Proceedings - PAPTAC 91st Conference, 7-9 Feb. 2005, Montreal, QC. , D-403-408. FREI, K.M., CAMERON, D., JASMIN, S., STUART, P.R. “Novel Sludge Drying Process for Cost-Effective Onsite Sludge

Management”, Proceedings - PAPTAC 91st Conference, 7-9 Feb. 2005, Montreal, QC., D-859-867.

HARRISON, R., LEROUX, R., STUART, P.R. “Representing TMP Process Fundamentals by Creating Non-linear Variables in Multivariate Analysis”, Proceedings - PAPTAC 91st Conference, 7-9 Feb. 2005, Montreal, QC. D-563-567.

LAFLAMME-MAYER, M., LINKEWICH, J., STUART, P.R. “Methodology for Using Real-Time Process Data for Supply Chain Optimization in the Pulp and Paper Industry”, Proceedings - PAPTAC 91st Conference, 7-9 Feb. 2005, Montreal, QC., D-895-902.

SALAZAR, E., SAMSON, R., MUNNOCH, K., STUART, P.R. “Identifying Environmental Improvement Opportunities for Newsprint Production Using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)”, Proceedings - PAPTAC 91st Conference, 7-9 Feb. 2005, Montreal, QC., D-851-856.

LAMA, I., PERRIER, M., STUART, P.R. “Directionality of Process Interactions in TMP-Refining”, Paprican University Report 2005.

HARRISON, R., LEROUX, R., STUART, P.R. “Data Pre-Processing Techniques for Multivariate Analysis to Treat Industrial Operating Data For Retrofit Design”. C-Den, 2nd Conference, 18-20 July 2005, Kananaskis, AB.

ANGELES J., et al, 2005. “Towards a Blueprint for Educating Design Engineers : Design Competency“, white paper, 58 pages.

GAUDREAULT, C., MARTIN, G., SAMSON, R., STUART, P.R., ˝ LCA Modeling of a Kraft Pulp and Paper mill˝, Proceedings - Canadian Society for Chemical Enginering (CSChE) 55th Conference, 16-19 October 2005, Toronto, ON. Comm. 507.

LAFOURCADE, S., STUART, P.R., “Heuristic based on Pinch Techniques for Practical Identification of Water and Energy Reduction Opportunities in Newsprint Mills”, Proceedings - Canadian Society for Chemical Enginering (CSChE) 55th Conference, 16-19 October 2005, Toronto, ON. Comm. 428

WISING, U., STUART, P.R., “The Potential for the Kraft Bio-Refinery in the Canadian Pulp & Paper Industry”, Proceedings - Canadian Society for Chemical Enginering (CSChE) 55th Conference, 16-19 October 2005, Toronto, ON. Comm. 425.

The Chair is proud of its three new

M.Sc. Dante Via & Steve Bellec (Dec.04) and Fernando Cornejo-Rojas (June 05). Fernando was hired immediately following his graduation as a junior process engineer within the Process Engineering Group at the Iron Ore Company of Canada (IOCC), which is part of the world's second biggest mining corporation and, at the same time, the largest iron ore mine in North America.

Steve Bellec is currently a Ph.D. Student at Université Laval, Québec City. Pr. Daniel Hodouin is his Director and Pr. Paul Stuart his co-director. His research project is entitled: "Réconciliation de données sur les messures contenant de grandes imprécisions". Dante Via, M.Sc. is currently a Research Associate in the Chair. He works on dynamic simulation of a fine paper machine and novel methodology for dynamic operability assessment.

Also Graduated in 2005 THE CHAIR TEAM IN 2005: New Arrivals Shahram Navaee-Ardeh Ph.D. Student

Design and Experimental Set-up of the Continuous Vertical Reactor and Finite Element Modeling of a Novel Biological Drying Process.

P. Stuart / F. Bertrand

M. Perrier / P. Stuart

Antoine Berton, Post-doctoral Fellow

Dante Via, Research Associate

P. Stuart Dynamic Simulation of a Fine Paper Machine and Novel Methodology for Dynamic Operability Assessment. "

Automatic control of the stock approach system of a integrated newsprint mill using real-time optimization

Publications & Presentations

Soon to be graduated - Future Industry Leaders!

Ph.D.

M.Sc.A. Fatiha AKROUR

Bertrand PIGEON

Geneviève ROY

Ilich LAMA

Rob HARRISON

Sébastien LAFOURCADE

Matty JANSSEN

Geneviève Roy was awarded the 2005 Henry Bolker Prize. This prize is given in recognition of excellence in communica-tion and research. Based on his excellent academic results, Moncef Chioua, was transferred directly into the Ph.D. Programme. Martin Laflamme-Mayer was awarded with the prestigious FQRNT scholarship from the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies for the 2005-2006 contest. Shahram Navaee-Ardeh & Jean-Martin Brault were rewarded with the MAFS complementary scolarship.

Paul Stuart was nominated as President of the Canadian Society of Chemical Engineer-ing (CSChE) for 2005-2006. The official announcement was published in the Canadian Chemical News (May 2005).

Erica Salazar, Réjean Samson, Ken Munnoch and Paul Stuart won the Douglas Jones Envi-ronmental Award for the publication enti-tled "Identifying Environmental Im-provement Opportunities for Newsprint Production Using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)" presented at the 91st Pulp and Paper Technical Association of Canada

(PAPTAC) Annual Meeting in January 2005. It is the second time

Honors & Awards

Danielle MAJOR

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Pan American Advanced Studies Institute Program on Process Sys-tems Engineering (PASI)

From the 16th to the 25th of August there was a course in process systems engineering held at Iguazu falls in Argentina. Martin Laflamme-Mayer, Ulrika Wising and Paul Stuart were the participants from the chair. The PASI work-shop addressed four major areas: optimiza-tion, process and prod-uct design, process and supply chain opera-tions and process dy-namics and control. Well known professors in the field of process systems engineering gave lectures and seminars that were excellent. The social aspects of the course were great as well, were we all got to interact and network with both professors and students from across the Americas. Plus the location was great!

The Chair would like to thank our colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon University, and in particular Professor Ignacio Grossman for the opportunity to participate.

55th Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference.

From the 16th to the 19th of October the annual Chemical Engineering Conference (CSChE) was held at the convention center in Toronto. The theme of the conference was “Innovation for a healthy planet” and consisted of over 600 papers presented.

From the chair there were four presenters: Caroline Gaudreault, Sébastien Lafourcade, Shahram Navaee-Ardeh and Ulrika Wising. Canadian forum on LCM

The 2nd Canadian forum on the life cycle management (LCM) of products had place the 26th and 27th of October 2005. This forum, organized by CIRAIG, aimed to increase awareness to this approach and to facilitate its implementation. Participants were representatives from Natural Resources Canada, city of Montreal, Total, Alcan, Five Winds, different universities (Polytechnique, Uni-versity of Montreal, HEC, Laval University, UQAM, UQAC, Michi-gan University, Toronto University, etc.) and the Director Environ-ment of the European Comission. Guy Martin, main contact of the Chair at Domtar, et Caroline Gaudreault gave two presentations on the application of LCM in the pulp and paper industry. Capturing Canada’s Natural Advantage

On November 21st--, 2005 a workshop on biorefineries organized by PAPRICAN was held in Pointe-Claire. It was well attended by people from industry, academia and governmental organizations. The first part of the day consisted of presentations by experts in the field, such as Adriaan van Heiningen from University of Maine and Esteban Chornet from Université de Sherbrooke. In the afternoon, there were break-out sessions, where different aspects of the biorefinery were brainstormed. Finally, the day was summarized by the conclusions from the different break-out sessions and the needs for development, in order for the biorefinery to become successful in Canada, were identified.

2005 Special Events (cont’d)

Conférence 2005 à Toronto

Professor Marianthi Ierapetritou (our collaborator from Rutgers

University) and Paul Stuart at Iguazu Falls during

the PASI meeting.

Chair Day 2005 was held on February 23rd. The format was changed, providing our Partners with more value and in a one-day event. Bob Eamer (TargetForest) was the first of our guest speakers and presented current industry trends and critical strate-gies. The next guest speaker, Matthew Smith (3C Software) talked about added value opportunities of an enterprise cost sys-tem. This was followed by a series of 5-minute presentations given by each of our graduate students who had also prepared a poster. Several hours were allowed for visiting those posters. Our partners spent time informally, discussing in detail with our graduate students about their subject areas. 2nd Canadian Design Engineering Network Conference

In July, Paul Stuart and doctoral student Robert Harrison attended the 2nd Canadian Design Engineering Network Confer-ence, which took place in Kananaskis, Alberta. Robert presented a paper on data pre-processing techniques for multivariate analysis, emphasising the connection between original plant design and present-day data quality problems. FOR@C Seminar

Matty Janssen attended the Sum-mer School "Supply chain manage-ment in the forest products industry: fundamentals and innova-tions" on 16-17 June given by For@c at Université Laval. Dif-ferent aspects of value creation in the forest products chain were highlighted by a collection of seminars. Topics that were pre-sented included forest operations and planning, integrated plan-ning in the pulp and paper supply chain, forest certification and innovation in the forest products industry. All these topics closely relate to several projects within the chair.

The Chair would like to thank Professor Sophie d’Amours of Université Laval for the opportunity to have attended.

3C Software training In January a group of students in the Chair attended a 3-day training course on the cost modeling software called Impact:EDC. During these 3 days, the students were exposed to the basics of cost modeling using Impact:EDC and its different features. Impact:EDC is used in the Chair as it is a state-of-the-art cost modeling tool that can be used for different purposes such as cost modeling for operational issues as well as process design. Ph.D. Students Martin Laflamme-Mayer and Matty Janssen have been using 3C’s IMPACT cost accounting software in their projects with success, and would like to acknowledge the great support provided by Paul Naliwajka from 3C Software.

Process Design in the Chemical Engineering Curriculum: Best Practices 101

The first Bantrel Forum on Design in Chemical Engineering was held 18-19 October, during this year’s 55th Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference at the Metro Toronto Conven-tion Centre. The goal of this year’s forum was to share experi-ences and synthesize best practices on two themes: Design throughout the chemical engineering curriculum, and the Chemi-cal engineering capstone design sequence. The forum was a great success, with over 50 participants over 1½-days including industry and many design education leaders from chemical engi-neering departments across Canada. Through presentations, break-out groups and discussion it was found that practices in undergraduate design education vary widely between departments. However even given this charac-teristic, a fairly extensive list of best practices was developed during the forum. Perhaps excellence in design in the chemical engineering curriculum is achieved by those programs which culminate in a project design activity taking place directly with industry, involving a client-consultant relationship. This guarantees projects that are unique, multidisciplinary, open-ended, and which will typically change in scope as they execute – requiring extensive engineering judgment by the design teams.

PEPITe Training

On the 28th and 29th of June PEPITe S.A. from Belgium gave a course on their software. The course was held over the internet where the instructor, Laurent Eschenauer, was in Belgium and the students were at École Polytechnique. Their software is mainly used for data mining. The first day Laurent went through the basics of data mining and the second day was a tutorial on their software. It was a great class and hopefully we will see more of PEPITe in the second chair mandate.

Energy Benchmarking Roundtable

Paul Stuart participated in the En-ergy Benchmarking Roundtable for the pulp and paper sector co-hosted by the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC) and the Office of Energy Efficiency (OEE) on June 16, 2005 in Ottawa, Ontario.

This event was intended to allow the participants to gauge their energy efficiency performance by:

• Comparing their facility’s performance relative to peers; • Learning about energy efficiency strengths and weaknesses

common in the pulp & paper sector; • Discussing next steps in assessing opportunities identified in

the energy benchmarking study, and • Considering priorities for action to enhance the energy

efficiency of the sector.

2005 Special Events

The Chair is fortunate to be able to attend many invited speakers at École Polytechnique, either

through our invitation or the invitation of our colleagues. Some of the guest speakers this year included the following: • Professor Sophie d’Amours, Université

Laval (Quebec City), "Integration, optimization and synchronization in the value creation net-work of a pulp and paper enterprise” - 17 March 2005.

• Professor Risto Ritala, University of Tam-pere, (Tampere, Finland), "From Measure-ments to Decision Support: Applications Within the P&P Industry" - 19 July 2005.

• Professeur Roland Clift de University of Surrey, Grande-Bretagne, “Climate change and energy policy: The importance of sustainability arguments” - 17 novembre 2005.

• Professor Thore Bertnsson, Chalmers University (Goteborg, Sweden), "Future Biorefineries- Some Aspects on Energy Optimization and CO2 Mitigation” - 05 December 2005.

• Ted Laks & Earle Chin, Noranda-Falconbridge Inc., (Toronto, Ontario), “Six Sigma & Capital Management Overview” - 15 December 2005.

Invited Speakers

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Meeting at Guanajuato of NAMP-PIECE program directors The directors of the student mobility program NAMP-PICE held their annual meeting in Guanajuato in Mexico from the 10th until the 13th of August. Two students that participated in the exchange program, viz. Jean-Martin Brault, PhD. student in our Chair at École Polytechnique de Montréal and Daniel Grooms of Texas A&M University, were present at this meeting. The principal objective of this meeting was to establish a global strategy for highlighting the impact of the accomplished activities during the program, which is ending soon. Jean-Martin executed a survey on the consecutive use of the developed modules at the participating universities. The importance of information and communication technology in basic engineering education also was a subject of this survey. This meeting defined the basis for the publication of which Jean-Martin will be first author. This publication will dicuss the success

and the impact of the NAMP-PIECE progam on the student communities at the universities that participated in the program. Student Exchanges:

Derek McCormack, from the University of Ottawa finished his 4-month exchange period at Texas A&M University. Derek constructed the module entitled "Process Integration and Process Control - Part I". The last exchange with Mexico brought us Jorge Alberto Porras Rodriguez, a graduate student from University of Guanajuato. Jorge is working on a concrete example for Module 12 which is the continuation of Zoe Perin-Levasseur’s works. It is the design of a network pinch analysis in a pulp and paper mill, in order to apply the pinch analysis method in an existing heat exchange network. Up-to-now, 28 exchanges have been completed, two modules are on-going and two others are planned to be constructed early next year.

NAMP-PIECE

• “But when you go into industry, you don’t have chemical and mechanical engineering, you just have problems and you have to solve them.” From “Engineers plot collapse of Ivory Tower”, The Gazette, July 29, 2005.

• “That, along with a concerted effort to increase the yields and growth rates of commercial forests are the kind of initiatives that are needed. We need to look 20 years from now. We need to change the paradigm. We need to do this in Canada”. From “Saving the Canadian Industry: discussing possible solutions”,

Pulp & Paper Canada 106:1 2005, pp. 25-27.

• “You need a good steam host to have co-gen, and mills make a good steam host” The Future of Energy in the Post-Kyoto World”, Pulp & Paper Canada, 106:7/8 2005 pp. 20-21.

• "It's so much more profitable to do a process integration study before installing cogeneration because it's very easy to sub-optimize a cogeneration system," says Ulrika Wising, one of the authors of Strategic Approach to Co-Generation Design. Wising is working for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Environmental Design Engineering Chair in Process Integration, at École Polytechnique de Montréal. Article entitled “Process integration and cogeneration mean big savings for pulp and paper » posted on NR-Can Web site in their bulletin Heads Up, dated September 15, 2005, vol. IX no. 18.

The Chair is getting quoted!

Four of our Ph.D. Students

at a mill

Mill Visits

Abitibi-Consolidated at Belgo

During the spring and summer of 2005, Imad Sleiman, research associate, spent several weeks at the Abitibi-Consolidated Belgo paper mill in Shawinigan. The purpose of these visits was to gain a thorough knowledge of the process, to interact with mill engineers and operators, and to gather data. All this information was used to develop a steady-state simulation of the entire mill. The smooth communication with mill people was crucial to successfully accomplish this task. The model is currently being expanded to include the dynamic behaviour of the mill in order to study alternatives for an optimal control of the broke and white water recirculation.

Abitibi-Consolidated Blitz

In February 2005, Sébastien Lafourcade participated in a "Blitz" at a newsprint mill of one of the Chair's partners. Being a key stage in the con-tinuous improvement process, this Blitz focused on the re-duction of energy and water consumption. Through this great technical and social ex-perience, Sébastien was able to observe the practical implica-tions of his research work and how this work can be applied in the improvement cycle at mills.

Abitibi-Consolidated at Thorold

After having participated in the Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference in Toronto last October, several Chair students visited the Thorold mill which is about 1h30 from Toronto. They therefore had the opportunity to see a Canadian mill that produces 100% deinked newsprint paper and it gave them another chance to in-crease their knowledge of the pulp and paper industry.

Domtar Mill at Ashdown

In April, Caroline Gaudreault and Ulrika Wising visited Domtar Ashdown mill located in Arkansas. This visit aimed at collecting necessary data for the construction of a life cycle model of the prod-ucts manufactured at this mill. The visit allowed Caroline to estab-lish contacts with key person at the mill in order to be able to com-plete the model and to assess the impact of potential process modi-fications.

Tembec Mill at Temiscaming

In June 2005, Martin Laflamme-Mayer returned to Tembec’s High-Yield Pulp mill in Temiscaming, Quebec. The aim of this visit was to get rele-vant information concerning operation and cost management practices at the mill. For this, many inter-views were done and additional process data were acquired. Martin also had the opportunity to present and discuss with different stakeholders at the mill (production, planning and information management) the latest developments of the cost modeling project.

Some of the Chair Activities at Pulp & Paper Mills

Four of our Ph.D. Students

at a mill

From Erica Salazar « I'm okay, at the mine site. I have been

designated as the BHP Billiton representative for an inter-company Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) study on copper. The team work is formed by the biggest copper producers in the world: BHP Billiton, Río Tinto, Anglo-American and Codelco. I'm very happy to be able

to apply the things that I learned in the chair. »

Newborns:

Frantisek Bednar and his wife Sona welcomed their son, born on September 1st, 2005 at 13:50 in Rimavska, Sobota. He was 3.6 kg and 53 cm. Mom and baby are doing well. Frantisek was successively a post-doctoral fellow and research associate from 2001 to 2004.

Serge Tellier also became a Dad on October 6th 2005. Raphaël was 8.8 pounds and 22 inches. Congratulations to the happy parents: Serge and Pascale. Serge Tellier was part of our research team from 2001 à 2004 as our Chair Webmaster and also collaborated into the Canadian Design Engineering Network (C-Den) Project.

Just Married:

Christelle Pons and Jerome Marteaux. Christelle has been working for 3 years in Paris for an Engineering Firm in the Petroleum Area. Christelle performed a several month-training in the Chair in 2001.

Alumni Section

Christelle Pons & Jerome August 2005

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