Project: Advanced Process Control Upgrade
LYONDELLBASELL Australia is one of the world’s largest polymers, petrochemicals and fuels companies with more than 16,000 employees worldwide.
The company needed to upgrade its process control system in one of its two polypropylene plants which is based in Clyde NSW.
Commissioned in 1991, the Clyde plant is a single line two reactor plant that procedures the full range of polypropylene products with a production capacity of 170,000tpa.
Pavilion Technologies was awarded the contract to develop and commission, with assistance of plant personnel, the advanced control models for the Clyde plant.
The upgrade involved the implementation of an Advanced Process Control system, and because Pavilion uses nonlinear multivariable predictive optimizer-controllers and virtual online analysers instead of only linear modelling, the Clyde plant enjoys several productivity benefits.
These include the improved control of transitions where xylene solubles, ethylene content and melt flow index are changed simultaneously between grades and the increased speed of reaching on-grade specifications when changing between different melt flow indexes.
Both of these improvements have resulted in an improvement in the quality of the polypropylene the company makes.
The transition time taken between when a new grade is invoked and when the new grade is within ongrade manufacturing specifications has been reduced by an average of 49%.