USER REPORT in Bad
USER REPORT in Bad Marienberg in the Westerwald region. The company develops plants to shred, convey, separate, and store wood, biomass, plastics, paper and household & commercial The star screening machine separates excess lengths from the material. The screened excess lengths and offcuts from the board sorting are transported to the drum chipper via belts and vibrating conveyors. The drum chipper shreds the resulting waste wood to dryercapable chip size. waste. “Our tasks include consultancy, planning and finding solutions. We provide integrated project management, including installation, commissioning and comprehensive service,” explains Michael Mützel, Regional Sales Manager in the Wood I Biomass Division at Vecoplan. Wolf-Christian Küspert has known him for a long time through joint projects. The Managing Director has known Vecoplan for even longer: “Even my father and grandfather relied on the reliability of Vecoplan machines and the company’s competence. I grew up with that name. Here, the old German saying is: “Cobbler, stick to your last.” Vecoplan was involved in the project from the very beginning. “We received the order in January 2020,” says Michael Mützel. “We accompanied the planning phase and were able to build our facilities on the greenfield site during the new construction.” The delivery date was in the summer of 2020, and installation and commissioning took place in November. Wood chopped into small pieces Motor noise fills the hall. Vecoplan expert Mützel points to the equipment installed by the Vecoplan team. From the saw line, sawdust and chips fall through the floor of the saw hall onto a long conveyor belt. The conveyor technology transports the material to a star screen to separate excess lengths. The matching waste wood falls onto another conveyor belt. The screened excess lengths and offcuts from the board sorting are transported to the drum chipper via belts and vibrating conveyors. These feed the material to be processed horizontally to the machine. Vecoplan technicians adapted the chipper to match the sawmill’s tasks and achieved a homogeneous and highquality result. “Our series is extremely compact,” says Mützel. “The shredding principle reduces the waste wood to a chipping length of about ten millimetres to be fed directly to the drying process in the pellet plant opposite.” The chips produced by the chipper are then fed back onto the long conveyor belt under the saw line. A chain conveyor takes the waste wood, which has been freed from excess lengths, out of the hall together with the material rated as good by the star screen and transfers it to an approximately 40 metrelong VRF pipe conveyor in the direction of the pellet mill. So that nothing is lost “This series consumes about half as much electricity as similar conveyor belt systems,” Mützel reports. The VRF transports the material across the yard to the storage boxes and a screening station. To ensure that nothing is lost, the tubular system completely encloses the material so that neither wind nor storm can blow it away. The conveyor belt in this series passes through a tube; it does not run on rollers as in conventional conveyors. Since an air cushion supports the belt, only minor friction losses occur during operation. It also runs quietly, which makes for a more pleasant atmosphere on the premises. Each drive station is equipped with two scrapers. Users can adjust the front head scraper and the carbide scraper from outside the machine. The components can be re-tensioned quickly and easily with a ratchet. The front head scraper is flexible but strong enough to remove extraneous materials from the belt. The carbide scraper is more thorough and prevents resin, for example, from sticking to the belt. These scrapers reduce maintenance times, increase equipment availability, and reduce material carry-over. The system conveys the material at a maximum of 2.5 metres per second. Another Vecobelt, approximately 80 metres in length, carries the waste wood from the screening station to the pellet plant. An optimal location “The transport routes here are short and energy-saving so that we can save several thousand truck trips a year,” says Küspert. The pellets are not only sold regionally; they are also supplied to various wood pellet gasifiers operated by the Stadtwerke Wunsiedel, GELO and other partners. The electricity generated is fed into the SWW grid. The heat supplies local networks in neighbouring districts, and the power plant also transfers its waste heat to the pellet plant to dry the chips. Küspert is certain: “A project this big can only succeed with the right partners.And to reduce the complexity, I have to be able to rely on them. With a partner like Vecoplan, I know that things will run smoothly. And if things don’t work out, their experts know exactly what to do.” The time frame of the project was tight. Covid-19’s entry restrictions delayed the work of the installation crews from Finland and Portugal. Still, the wood processing company was finally able to start its regular operations at the end of February 2021. And just three months later, the company was already running at a stable 80 % of its total capacity. www.vecoplan.com 14 No. 4 • November 2022
SUSTAINABILITY Development of utilisation options for calamity wood: „NUKAFI“ project launched The Federal Ministries BMEL and BMUV have reacted to this dramatic development with the funding call „Dealing with calamity areas and calamity wood“ (funding guideline „Forest Climate Fund“), within the framework of which the project supervised by the Agency of Renewable Resources e.V. (FNR) is running. The joint project is being carried out by 5 research partners, each with specific tasks. These include the Fraunhofer Institute for Wood Research (WKI) as project coordinator, the German Sawmill and Timber Industry Association (DeSH), the Georg-August University of Göttingen, the Centre for Forestry and Timber – Forest and Wood NRW and the Institute for Wood Technology Dresden (IHD). The project will be accompanied by the Harz National Park Administration, the Association of the German Wood-Based Panel Industry (VHI), ante-holz GmbH and EGGER Holzwerkstoffe Brilon GmbH & Co. KG. The aim is to systematically investigate the change in wood quality in spruce trees damaged by bark beetle infestation or in dead spruce trees that remain unharvested in the forest for a certain period of time after infestation or death in the sense of „standing storage“. The aim is to clarify how the wood quality changes depending on the storage period and the respective location and when further processing for certain wood products such as cross-laminated timber or wood-based materials is still possible. In addition, a guideline for forest owners and wood users is to be created, with the help of which a product-specific standing grading of calamity spruce is possible and the possible uses of the wood can be estimated. The tasks of the IHD are in particular the determination of biotic harmful organisms as well as physical-mechanical investigations on glued solid wood products. In August, the FNR joint project „Material utilisation options for standing calamity wood of the spruce tree species depending on damage progress and wood quality (NUKAFI)“ was launched. The background to this is the massive and further increasing forest damage. www.ihd-dresden.de Sustainable adhesives for furniture manufacturing FURNITURE The adhesive manufacturer Jowat from Detmold has made sustainability the guiding principle for its trade fair participation at this year’s Holzhandwerk. The “Green Adhesives” product line follows a holistic approach to sustainability and moves aspects such as resource conservation, healthy living environments and occupational safety to the center of modern bonding processes in furniture manufacturing. Sustainable and responsible joining processes go beyond the use of sustainably sourced raw materials, according to the adhesives expert Jowat. Therefore, the manufacturer’s “Green Adhesives” also contribute to the conservation of valuable resources and the protection of employees as well as end customers. For example, processors can protect their employees during the application process and at the same time avoid high training costs by choosing a tried and trusted monomer-reduced PUR hot melt adhesive with hazard-free labeling. Jowatherm-Reaktant ® MR 607.90 is one such hot melt adhesive with hazard-free labeling for general edgebanding purposes. It can be used for the bonding of established edgebands with through-feed edgebanders and is also supplied in the much demanded PUR granulate form. The premium grade Jowatherm- Reaktant ® MR 608.90 facilitates high-quality bonding with virtually invisible bondlines for superior furniture designs. Transition to the modern, monomer-reduced adhesives can be very easy. Low-emission adhesives of Jowat go yet a step further. As part of a responsible and sustainable bonding process, their use helps protect not only the processor but also the end customer. The dispersion adhesives Jowacoll ® 103.10 and Jowacoll ® 103.30 of the “Green Adhesives” series can impress with very low emissions of formaldehyde, plasticizers and other ingredients and support the manufacture of products with low emissions. The two dispersion adhesives meet durability class D3 and can be used for the bonding of hard and soft wood species as well as for the flat lamination of woodbased materials. In addition, Jowacoll ® 103.30 has been classified as having “low flammability” characteristics at the specified application amount and may also be used for interior finishing in shipbuilding. And not least, resource-conserving production processes can produce positive sustainability effects. In edgebanding, the unfilled PUR hot melt adhesive Jowatherm-Reaktant ® 608.00, which is also available in granulate form, can support manufacturers in that regard. The colorless glue line, its wide range of adhesion, excellent thermal stability and high initial strength coupled with a significantly reduced application amount for thinnest bondlines make this adhesive a very attractive partner for highest requirements in furniture manufacturing. The low-temp hot melt adhesive Jowatherm ® 282.20 facilitates energy savings in processing. This classic adhesive supports a sustainable minimization of manufacturing costs due to a significant reduction in energy consumption. In addition, it also optimizes safety at the workplace due to the reduced risk of burns. www.jowat.de Jowat showed its products of the “Green Adhesives” series for furniture manufacturing at Holzhandwerk. No. 4 • November 2022 15
