World's Largest Producer of Softwood Pulp Opts for Ultra-Large, Matrox-Powered Control Room Video Wall

A division of the €4.7 billion Metsä Group, Metsä Fibre 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. With an annual production capacity of 1.3 million tonnes of pulp, along with other bioproducts such as tall oil and turpentine, this next-generation bioproduct mill signals a new era—and new technological platforms—for the forestry industry.

Cutting-Edge Video Wall Technology

The bioproduct mill makes use of leading-edge automation and digitized monitoring systems for its high-speed production lines for woodcutting, washing, and more. To complement this, Metsä Fibre wanted a state-of-the-art 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.

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. Having a video wall is key to the mill’s operations as it enables process control through continuous monitoring, without which, the production line cannot function.

Data from automated quality inspection systems that check the pulp for the presence of metal, stones, and other foreign materials (for example, bullets stuck to the wood from hunting) are also additional sources of information that Metsä Fibre wanted to include on the video wall.

All lined up

With all of Metsa Fibre’s capture and display requirements, Elkome Systems decided on a massive 6.5-meter long, 12x1 video wall driven with multi-channel capture capabilities. 

Housed in a high-density, low-footprint 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 easily 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 robust Matrox MuraControl software. For day-to-day operations, an easy-to-use software—customized by Elkome for Metsä Fibre—that contains readymade setups is used.