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Matrox-powered control room video wall installed at bioproduct mill in Finland

Metsä Fibre, a division of the Metsä Group, is set to be the world’s largest producer and seller of softwood pulp through the recent inauguration of its new € 1.2 billion bioproduct mill in Äänekoski, Finland, which makes use of automation and digitized monitoring systems for its high-speed production lines for woodcutting, washing, and more.

To complement this, Metsä Fibre wanted a video wall solution for monitoring its production operations. Taking the recommendation of one of its main suppliers, Andritz Oy, Metsä Fibre reached out to local systems integrator Elkome Systems to manage the video wall installation. Elkome Systems collaborated with Matrox Graphics to implement the new video wall solution in the Äänekoski plant.

In each shift, two operators in the control room continuously monitor three high-speed line operations where wood is cut into smaller pieces. Part of the process control surveillance system has 36 Bosch IP video cameras permanently focused on the log cutting operations. These feed into a Bosch video server onsite. The operators have the ability to switch to any of the inputs from the 36 cameras, which need to be displayed on a video wall.

Data from automated quality inspection systems that check the pulp for the presence of metal, stones, and other foreign materials are also additional sources of information that Metsä Fibre wanted to include on the video wall. With all of Metsa Fibre’s capture and display requirements, Elkome Systems decided on a 6.5-meter long, 12x1 video wall driven with multi-channel capture capabilities.

Housed in a single 4U Advantech video wall controller are three Matrox Mura IPX cards which can each capture up to four 4K inputs and encode/decode multiple 4K streams. The Mura IPX cards capture the outputs of the Bosch video server as well as the automation systems via four and six inputs respectively - all in Full HD (1920 x 1080p60) resolution - so operators can pull up monitoring data points on the wall. In the same system are two Matrox C680 graphics cards that power the 12 pivoted displays at 1080p60 where multiple video sources are viewed simultaneously.

Initial set up and other administrative tasks are done entirely with the Matrox MuraControl software. For day-to-day operations, a software customized by Elkome for Metsä Fibre (that contains readymade setups) is used.

A portion of the video wall is also dedicated to displaying the alarm lists from the 24/7 surveillance of the production control systems. Alarms are typically triggered when the received control system values do not fall within the expected value thresholds (for example, the temperature is too low or high). Should the alarm go off, the operators are able to see a complete picture of the issue at hand and promptly take appropriate action, including stopping the process if needed. The surveillance operators are able to share the display in question with other decision makers as well.

A second server is planned to be set up soon for redundancy sake. By using the Matrox-powered video wall, Metsä Fibre has ensured that it is future ready for network-based solutions.

www.matrox.com

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