Cases

Financial sustainability with best practices.

Zilor

Advanced Process Control - Sugar and Alcohol Fermentation Plant

Customer: Zilor

Location: Sao Jose unit - SP.

Challenge: Increase the productivity of the fermentation process.

Solution: A plant in upstate Sao Paulo, a leader in technology and innovation, decided to adopt a new strategy to improve the control in the feeding of its brewers. The quality of this feed expressed in soluble solids content ("brix" grade) should be maintained with the least possible variation to ensure the efficiency in the conversion of alcohol to the fermentor. This process presents several problems for its control, such as disturbances, interactivity, dead time and non-linearity, making its improvement quite challenging. To achieve a better performance in the control of this process, several technologies were adopted, such as expert systems and predictive control (MPC).

Results: The use of these technologies integrated with the same control strategy allowed a reduction of around 80% in the variability of the degree "Brix" and increased the efficiency of the fermentation. The OptProcess© system control adopted in the project presented a more stable operation with considerably lower variability than the previous control.