Reducing the Deposition of Scale in the Evaporator of a Mechanical Vapour Recompression System for Concentration of Pulp Mill Effluents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A numerical model was developed, validated with the aid of pilot evaporator tests, and used to assess practical methods of minimizing scaling observed in a mechanical vapour recompression (MVR) plant at Millar’s Western’s Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan pulp mill. On average, 8,000 m3/day of effluent (approximately 7 m3/Bone Dry Tonne product) resulting from bleached-chemi-thermo-mechanical wood processing, are purified and the recovered water is returned to the plant while the effluent is concentrated to 75% TD&SS in a recovery boiler. The evaporators are used in the first stage of the feed concentration process. The system uses a heat pump principle: steam produced during the boiling of the falling liquid film is mechanically compressed and condensed on the outer surface of a vertical tube evaporator. Most of the condensation and compression heat is recovered. Reducing the rate of scale deposition and increasing the interval between two successive cleaning operations of vertical evaporators used in the MVR scheme was identified as an essential component of operation costs and given special attention. To assist the mill in assessing practical methods for achieving this goal an experimental pilot evaporator and a numerical model were developed and used first at the Alberta Research Council in Edmonton, Canada, and then at the mill location. The mill uses a different model for control and supervision of system parameters. The magnitude of the (critical) temperature difference (CTD) across the laminar sub-layer of boiling liquid film is calculated and is recommended in this paper to be used to quantify the fouling tendency. Further to recommendations resulting from previous experimental investigations [1,2] as well as in this study, the mill introduced additional process control parameters to reduce and maintain the temperature drop across the effluent boiling film to a maximum range of 2–4°C. In addition to CTD, the wall (top-bottom) axial temperature difference (ATD) has been identified as another criteria for assessing potential scale deposition during evaporation-concentration. Calculations and experimental measurements performed with the pilot evaporator [3] suggest that increasing the circulation rate of effluent pumped from the sump to feed the liquid film at the top of evaporator tubes has a positive effect on reducing the CTD and the ATD. During four months of laboratory investigations with a pilot evaporator, non-uniform liquid distribution among vertical evaporator tubes of the evaporator was observed and is discussed separately. This paper will present the model and mill observations and summarize the main results and suggested practical strategies for reducing the rate of scale deposition and improving the system economics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".