Model based optimization of a resin-impregnated paper air-drying line

Abstract

The air-drying of resin impregnated paper sheets in industrial lines, formed by a serial array of furnaces, presents a high number of different controllable operational parameters whose adjustment, usually done by the maintenance staff, leads to non-efficient configurations. A model-based numerical tool, which predicts accurately in a few seconds the evolution of the paper temperature and paper grammage along the line for a given combination of the input operational parameters (direct design), was used coupled to an optimization tool to select appropriate operational parameters (inverse design) that ensure a drying process quality (i.e., fulfills an objective grammage profile) with a minimum of energy consumption. The numerical tool was capable of selecting suitable configurations with an energy reduction of up to 50% for several tested industrial cases, making the model an essential tool in the framework of the increasingly relevant role of digital twins in industry.

Keywords:

• Optimization
• model based numerical tool
• air-drying fast prediction
• resin impregnated paper
• digital twin in industry

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 Except where otherwise explicitly indicated, all variables and constants involved in the description of the predictive model are expressed in the international system of units.

2 For more details, see^[19] or visit www.mathworks.com

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Spanish Instituto Tecnológico de Matemática Industrial (ITMATI), now CITMAga [Grant Numbers: C69-2019, C80-2020, and C83-2020].