A sphere under assembly at Metso ND.

Sappi Saiccor is the uncontested world leader in chemical cellulose (dissolving pulp) in many ways. With its production facility near the port city of Durban in South Africa, the company is by far the world’s largest manufacturer of this product, used extensively to make viscose staple fiber for textiles. Sappi Saiccor is also the first producer in the world to make chemical cellulose from Eucalyptus, a renewable resource, which the company cultivates on its own fields in South Africa.
 
Sappi Saiccor will soon strengthen its role further, as the company is expanding production capacity by 225,000 tons per year, to over 800,000 tons. The new capacity, scheduled to go online during 2008, will be achieved with a complete new fiber line.

A pulp-mill fiber line is a process that involves many wet and
aggressive stages. As a result, Sappi Saiccor’s expansion utilizes thousands of tons of stainless steel – coil, plate, and tubular products, in many grades including large amounts of duplex stainless steel.
With close to 2,000 tons, Outokumpu is one of the principal stainless suppliers for the project and has delivered close to all plate material used in the machinery and equipment.

The new fiber line incorporates 11 pulp digesters, large vessels where wood chips are turned into chemical cellulose and side-products with the help of chemicals and heat. The digesters have given Outokumpu an opportunity to apply its hot-rolled plate capabilities in a novel way: Outokumpu has put together optimized packages of prefabricated plate sections, delivered as kits to the digester manufacturer Metso ND Engineering (Pty) Ltd. of South Africa for quick assembly at the Metso ND plant in Durban. In so doing, Outokumpu has moved towards providing stainless steel solutions. By sourcing the entire duplex plate kit from one supplier, Metso ND has considerably simplified its procurement task and has successfully managed to complete the entire delivery on a tight schedule.
 
To make the kits, Outokumpu first rolled grade 2205 duplex plates, purpose-designed for the application, at the Group’s hot rolled plate plant in Degerfors, Sweden. The plates were delivered from the Outokumpu mill ready for assembly, preformed, polished, and with edges prepared for welding. Cold forming of complicated sections was carried out at the neighboring plant of the metal fabricator Deform AB of Sweden.
 
In addition to the digesters, Outokumpu supplied tailor-made plates with edges prepared for welding for two reactors and three spheres, all manufactured by Metso ND. The reactor heads where produced by Halikko Works in Finland, and the sphere sections where delivered as prefabricated kits from Deform AB.

Metso ND staff and a completed digester ready to ship to Sappi Saiccor.	Bengt Christensson, Managing Director, Deform AB (right) and Anders Finnås of Outokumpu inspecting pulp-mill