Saving energy while reducing wear and tear

Instalmec has been designing and building plants for the production of particleboard, MDF and OSB for over 30 years and says it has paid special attention to the study and development of innovative solutions meant to save energy and reduce wear and maintenance costs.

“A saved kilowatt means €1,000 saved per year,says the company.

Instalmec has recently started up a “state-of-the-artMDF dryer with a throughput of 15 ton/hour (tph) of fibre, equipped with a washing system for exhaust gases and a heat recovery system.

Thanks to the installation of new technologies like the LPD (Low Pressure Drop) cyclones, the company says it has been possible to reduce the energy absorption of the cyclones by 60%, to recover 1,200,000kcal/hour, and to bring down dust and formaldehyde emissions.

One more recent innovation concerning MDF plants concerns the 35tph new Fibre Separator, which Instalmec installed at Italian panel maker Gruppo Frati’s factory.

Its installed power is 250kW and Instalmec claims it is the first separator in the world where the fan is installed in vacuum and therefore is the first plant where the fibre does not pass through the fan.

This means that the fibre is not damaged by the impact of the fan blades, which benefits the mechanical properties of the panel. Thanks to its innovative operating principle, says Instalmec, this new separator is much more efficient than traditional systems, since it manages to eliminate not only the glue lumps and the ‘crusts’ from the dryer, but also the wood particles which leak

from the defibrator when its discs are too worn. The new fibre separator is available in different sizes up to a 50tph throughput on a single machine.

For the particleboard industry, this Italian innovator says it has developed a plant which cleans recycled wood. “The performance of this plant is so good that we guarantee a cleaning efficiency of over 95%,says the company.

“One of the most interesting features of this plant is the possibility to tune the silica content in the panel thanks to our innovative pneumatic screen which can separate the silica by eliminating the fraction below.”

Instalmec has also developed various innovations for particleboard dryers and says it has the experience and know-how to update existing dryers in order to increase the throughput of the plant, reduce its energy consumption, eliminate the continuous problems of wear, reduce the emissions, and make them safer from fire hazards.

The company says it was the first to introduce the gravimetric separator in place of the omega system, to re-study completely the pneumatic circuits and to install the fan after the cyclones.

Instalmec is also now creating small-size plants for the production of particleboard, MDF and OSB panels.

The throughput of these plants will range from 150-500m3/day and the idea behind them is that they can be easily installed in areas where wood raw material is available, to cover the panel needs of a localised region.

In pellet plants, Instalmec says it has developed interesting products such as the 30tph gravimetric separator installed at La Tiesse – the biggest Italian pellet producer – which it claims improves dryer performance and removes even the smallest foreign bodies from the material to be pelletised.

Also, Instalmec says it offers the 6.8MW biomass-fed hot gas generator equipped with a special system of exhaust gas recovery which allows savings of 20% on fuel and the reduction of emissions by 40%.