Direct Savings: US$ 250,000 (1% EPCM contract value)

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Losses Avoided:  US$ 1,000,000 (4% EPCM contract value)

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Other:    + Project Reliability

              + Responsiveness

              + Schedule Adherence

              + Construction Support

              - Re-work

              + Safety

 

​THE CHALLENGE:

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KLABIN was founded in 1899 and is the largest integrated paper mill in Brazil and one of the largest in the world. It has 14 units spread across Brazil and Argentina, exports to 70 countries, employs 14,000 workers and has annual gross revenues of US$ 2 Billion (2013).

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KLABIN is also known worldwide by its efforts in sustainable management of natural resources: wood, water and energy. One of the key principles of KLABIN sustainability program is the recycling of wood chips remaining from wood processing. Wood chips are burned in special furnaces under controlled conditions generating extremely low emissions and a great amount of energy that is captured in the form of steam. This steam is continuously recycled into the paper production process (saving water and energy) and its excess is used for power generation (saving more energy).

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By 2005, KLABIN launched it largest investment plan, the MA-1100, worth US$2.2 Billion (2005 prices). MA-1100 involved the installation of a new and revolutionary paper processing machine (MP-9) supplied by VOITH - Germany, with processing capacity of 350,000 ton/year of hard board paper.

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To make room for this gigantic machine it was necessary to expand several auxiliary units of the Monte Alegre unit (Telemaco Borba, PR, Brazil), including a new building more than 300 meters long, new pipeways, a new boiler-furnace, and a new steam turbine (TG-8) with 70Mw/hour capacity, enought to power a 220,000 people town or 40% of KLABIN Monte Algre Unit. Several contractor were hired and among them POYRY (furnaces and interconnections), CNEC (TG-8) and CAMARGO CORREA (construction).

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For approximately 6 months a multidisciplinary team from CNEC worked together with SIEMENS to develop TG-8 turbine, the first of its kind in Brazil. Despite the relatively small size of the TG-8 unit, its project can be considered of great complexity.  MP-9 worked together with a 70 meters high furnace which due to its dimensions and features produced predominantly super-high pressure steam (400°C/150BAR), a fluid extremely energetic and highly difficult to handle. Loads at pipe support could easily reach 11tons and any microscopic crack in the pipe would produce a steam jet capable of cutting a steal plate. To handle these extreme conditions it was necessary to build the pipelines with a very special alloy (known as ASTM A335 P91), extremely expensive and difficult to work.

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Everything seemed to be running fine with the project until a road accident damaged in a irreversible way the TG-8 turbine case while moving between SIEMENS facilities. To prevent project delays, SIEMENS offered KLABIN another turbine and assumed all costs involving project adaptations.

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CNEC, however, had already demobilized most project staff and some professionals had inclusive left the company. The solutions was to bring as much people back together and hire IATEC Plant Solutions to make the necessary adjustments in the project and reissue all documentation for construction. What looked a pretty simple job end up being a race against the clock to verify and correct the entire project in less than 2 months.

  

​THE WORK:

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Due to the advanced stage of the foundations and to the similarity of the new and old turbine, SIEMENS and CNEC imagined that few adjustments would be enough and quickly everything would be ready to be reissued, fabricated and assembled.

 

 

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However, reality proved more complex. Right in the first week IATEC Plant Solutions detected several problems in the model that could lead to severe project errors. Several elements that should have been modeled together didn´t have due to the CNEC/POYRY scope division. Most of the time those two companies worked separately exchanging information on paper rather then electronically, what hardly could be different since POYRY worked in PDS while CNEC in PDMS, two well known but completely incompatible systems.

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One of the first things IATEC Plant Solutions did when joining the project was to merge CNEC and POYRY models into a single review session and add the structures that did not show up in neither of them. The result demonstrated several interferences between the scope of the two companies, which not only involved particularly sensitive pipelines due to space limitations but also had to be quickly addressed due to the advanced stage of interconnections construction.

 

 

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The absence of important elements in the model attracted the attention of IATEC Plant Solutions which decided to inspect pipeline design and discovered that several pipelines had not been modeled under the excuse that they would be done "by field". Also, the large and complex pipe supports necessary to hold together such large and heavy pipes had not been modeled. The same happened with the cable trays which were absent of any space planning. The problem is that under the severe space restrictions within the turbine building any tiny lay-out mistake could turn into serious constructions, or even worse, operational and security issues.

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IATEC Plant Solutions modeled the remaining pipelines as well as all cable trays and pipe supports just to realize that many of them could not be installed in the planned positions due to interferences with structural elements that also have not been modeled but were already built.

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Several supports had to be modified...

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Pipelines and cable trays had to be rearranged in order to accommodate all project elements and respect the required circulation areas. 

 

 

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Still worried about space distribution, IATEC Plant Solutions searched for all valve vendor documentation and discovered that all wheel arrangement was based on outdated reference drawings which had not been updated once the certified drawings had arrived. Wheel mounts expected to have 1.90 meters long were in fact 2.40 meters long and completely blocked all operational circulation area and escape routes.

 

 

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Going a little further, IATEC Plant Solutions decided to inspect the main instruments and discovered several inconsistencies between the current position and what was recommended by manufacturers risking the operation and the performance of the plant.

 

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Also, several errors in the supplier documentation were found which potential to create interferences and assembly problems.

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The hardest part was yet to come. New turbine steam inlets and outlets were rather different from the previous ones. The preliminary turbine drawings did not mention several details that appeared in the final documentation and because of this had not been modeled. To make matters worse, several uncertainties in the stress calculations and support arrangement emerged. All this demanded an intensive work of lay-out rearrangement to correct the project while preserving what had been already built.

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In the end, all main steam lines had to be re-designed, re-calculated and re-supported to attend to the new demands and space limitations imposed by what had already been built. IATEC Plant solutions actively participated in the process making analysis, suggestions and 3D simulations.

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In order to avoid that all these changes negatively affected construction schedule, IATEC Plant Solutions trained field inspectors to use the 3D review tool to program the electro-mechanical assembly and extract detailed images to give precise instructions to their field workers. This way construction packages could be issued "just-in-time", moving from verified parts of the project towards the ones still under revision. The impact of this measures surprised everybody by the good reception the 3D images had among field works and the client supervision, which both end up preferring to use the 3D model to follow design and construction progress rather than waiting for the traditional 2D plants.

 

​RESULTS:

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The accumulation of bad modeling practices almost put a billionaire project in a bind. Thanks to the design check effort of IATEC Plant Solutions all project mistakes have been detected and corrected on time, avoiding losses for the CNEC-SIEMENS consortium around US$ 1,000,000 (4% contract value) in re-work and contractual fines. Not to mention the financial loss for the client of approximately US$ 20.000/day if TG-8 was not ready and steaming out right at the first day of MA-1100 operation.