Rain Delay
August 7, 2014 3:24 pm Leave your thoughts
Hello Folks!
The summer is quickly coming to an end, but it won’t go quietly. Tropical storm Arthur slammed many of us on the east coast, including my home near Fredericton, and the mill here in Nackawic, NB. I know this news is a few weeks past, but I realized I had forgotten to mention it.
I won’t bore you all with a sob story about myself; I’ll just say that it is a real bummer to be without power, hot water, air conditioning and similar comforts. A positive side effect of the storm was that everybody’s freezers thawed, which meant a lot of summer BBQ! Expensive, but tasty. Apart from trees blown over and whatnot, (shown below), the mill also had major problems due to the strain on the electrical system.
For those who are not aware, pulp mills can generate the majority of their own electricity. This is accomplished as a part of the liquor recausticizing process. Spent black liquor is burned in a recovery boiler; this boiler, along with a partnering boiler, contains pipes filled with water. This ultra-purified water is heated up and converts into superheated steam. This mill produces steam of approximately 900psi. This steam is fed into a turbo generator, which generates the electricity for the mill. During the storm, the subsystems that support this generator were overloaded and failed.
This whole storm just solidified my first impression of an industry environment, summed up nicely as Murphy’s Law. It seems that whenever there is a chance of something becoming an issue to reduce production, it occurs. I suppose it just makes me appreciate it more when the facility is fully operational.
For this blog, I want to remind the fellow students out there about how global the forestry industry really is. Since I started my internship in May, I’ve met people who are from (or have worked in) countries including Austria, Poland, Brazil, USA, Sweden, China, India, Czech Republic and probably a few I am forgetting. Considering I have been here for less than 4 months, I think that is pretty intriguing.
Well folks, that’s all for today. In my next blog, I will discuss more about the steam project I am working on, and give some more general reviews of my experience thus far.
Thanks for reading!
Robert Silliker