Stronger Together In Imal-Pal Group

29 August 2018


The Imal-Pal Group continues to prosper and grow, with 2018 set to be another record year for this diverse company. Mike Botting met with managing director Loris Zanasi in Modena

As always, Loris Zanasi swept into the room like a whirlwind as we met in Imal- Pal Group’s headquarters in San Damaso, near Modena in northern Italy, in June.

This man – who began his career on the workshop floor of Imal srl and rose to manage the whole group of companies that it has become – together with his partners, Paolo Benedetti and Antonio dal Ben – is understandably enthusiastic about the company.

“I have so much to tell you about the group,” he enthused. “The first thing I want to tell you is that the Imal-Pal Group of companies will reach a record turnover for this year, 2018. We will achieve a total turnover of about €210m, for products manufactured in seven different production sites in Italy and employing around 450 people. This compares with a turnover of €160m in 2017 and represents an increase of 31%, year-on-year.

“Imal and Pal together have become the world’s main suppliers of front-end equipment for panel lines. That means from dryer to forming station,” continued Mr Zanasi, proudly. “This includes all the new OSB plants in the world: Krono Ufa (Russia), Krono Strzelce (Poland), Krono Sanem (Luxembourg); and Vanachai (Thailand), which is building the first OSB plant in Thailand.”

Imal closed the deal with Vanachai for the complete front-end earlier this year.

“During 2017/18 we have also sold about 20 units of our Dynasteam worldwide (making 100 altogether), with 11 units to be manufactured and delivered between June and December 2018 alone."

The Dynasteam, for those who don’t know, is a steam injection unit which is placed in front of any make of continuous hot press. The system is designed to inject a continuous, pre-set, quantity of steam onto the top and bottom surface of the mat – or bottom surface only, depending on the application – as it is fed into the press.

This steam has the effect of raising the temperature of the mat, leading to faster cure times and an increase in the capacity of the production line. The pressure and quantity of steam injected into the mat is regulated by PLC in proportion to the production speed of the line and the type of board produced. Dynasteam is suitable for use on MDF, particleboard and OSB lines, says the company.

“We have installed two Dynasteam presses in both MDF lines in the factory of Unilin in Bazeilles, France,” continued Mr Zanasi.

“We are also concentrating very much on a special gluing system for particleboard,” said the managing director. “This is the PB Hi-Jet high-pressure gluing system and we are now busy completing an installation at Egger, Brilon, in Germany. Egger’s St Johann plant already had such a system installed two years ago. We have also received two more orders from Egger for its plants in Poland and Columbus, US.”

According to Imal, the system nebulises the resin and the micro glue particles produced form a saturated environment so that, as the wood particles pass through, their surface is covered by an ideal quantity of resin before they are fed into the blender. With traditional technology, the fines were always over-glued because they tended to absorb as much as five or seven times more than the amount absorbed by the larger particles, says Imal. A special chute is equipped with a motorised selfcleaning system, and is used to convey the resinated material to the blender infeed.

This particular gluing method and system is protected by four patents.

“The Hi-Jet system is also very successfully used in MDF lines,” said Mr Zanasi. “It injects the resin at 100Bar, directly into the blowline, using our special nozzles and control system, and that 100Bar remains constant at any rate of glue flow.

We can also claim that in two MDF lines in a European board producer’s factory, they have dismantled the resination systems of one of our competitors and replaced them with ours. In fact, we have supplied 168 Hi- Jet systems worldwide to date.”

Mr Zanasi also said that, during a very successful Xylexpo exhibition in Milan in May this year, he had taken an order for a Hi-Jet for particleboard for a European customer and that this order had not been foreseen before he went to the show. That's unusual. Based on the same principle of resination, Imal has also developed a special system for OSB, removing the need for the oldstyle drum blender and motorised spinning heads,” said Mr Zanasi.

“We applied a Hi-Jet system consisting of the distribution of strands falling down from a belt scale through large diameter, high-speed brush rollers, thus creating a ‘curtain’ of strands.

This curtain falls around a ‘wing’ equipped with high-pressure resin nozzles, which ‘paints’ the strands as they pass.

“The glued strands then arrive at a low-speed blender, which is stationary [unlike a conventional drum blender], and mixing is done by an internal shaft, rotating at low speed,” explained Mr Zanasi.

“Imal is the only company to have supplied the largest OSB gluing system in the world, which can reach a daily capacity of 4,000m3 of OSB per day, and a second order has already been received.”

In online controls and laboratory testing, he said the company had made “incredible developments which are unique in the market.” One example the managing director gave was the development of a full delamination detector, the FBC200, covering 100% of the surface of the board.

“On the laboratory side, we have a new machine that is extremely important for the safety of the laboratory staff, while increasing the speed and reliability of panel sample preparation. This is the SMC100,” said Mr Zanasi.

He explained that board samples are always prepared by several operators in every facility, crowding a space which can be very dirty and dusty and where there is a band saw and a sander. All the operations are carried out manually, which takes time and has a high risk of error when cutting and marking the samples by hand. This also puts operator safety at risk. Many accidents can occur when the small board samples are being cut, together with the operator’s fingers! An accident at work is very expensive for the employer, with consequent liabilities for the management. As a result, Imal has designed the SMC100 to eliminate these risks.

The SMC 100 cuts, marks and sands the board samples on the basis of a programmed cutting pattern. The operator running the press can use the double diagonal saw to cut the board, which can be from 400mm to 600mm wide. The board is then placed on the infeed belt to the SMC 100, which will prepare, cut and sand the samples as required. As a result, fewer operators will be needed and the investment is paid back rapidly, claims the company.

This machine is claimed to offer operator safety and no risk of error, as the samples are cut automatically on the basis of the cutting pattern set in the machine. The equipment is also fully enclosed for extra safety.

Smartlab is another recent product launch for Imal, which links in neatly with the SMC100 that prepares the samples for the laboratory, as we have seen. Smartlab is not entirely new in its content but what it does do is to bring a number of Imal-Pal testing procedures together in one place.

The full range of laboratory equipment in Smartlab includes testing units, surface density analysers, different kinds of moisture meter systems, optical technology for detecting the particle size of chips and fibre, density profilers and an automatic cutting unit. Imal says that the laboratory quality control systems are able to conduct all kinds of mechanical, chemical and quality tests, to all international standards and all in one place.

The equipment for the whole Smartlab system comprises: SMC 100; Screencam 100 optical lab screen; Fibercam 100 optical lab fibre screen, for both lab and online analysis after the fibre dryer; Infrasonic lab sifter and vibrating sifter; X-ray density profile analyser; IB700 board mechanical property tester, which has been adopted by several universities; water bath for swelling and boiling tests; lab formaldehyde testers; Absorbance Kit with spectrophotometer; determination of sand content; moisture meters; glue gel-time control; lab press; and lab glue blender. That would seem to be a comprehensive list!

Turning attention to the continuous press offered by Imal, Mr Zanasi said that there were several projects currently under negotiation and he had signed a contract for Imal’s third such press with a company in Vietnam. This is a complete-line project for Imal.

Turning to another form of press offered by the company, Mr Zanasi proudly told me that Imal had supplied 55 press production lines for pallet blocks and had three complete factories to be delivered. These are in France, Lithuania and Poland.

So, it seems that Mr Zanasi’s enthusiasm was very appropriate, since Imal-Pal has had a highly successful 2018 (already) and continues to innovate and develop new products for the panel manufacturing/ processing industry.

Pal Cleans Up

The second part of the Imal-Pal company name has been as busy as Imal itself and, among other projects, Pal has continually developed its Cleaning Tower concept. In May 2018, a Cleaning Tower was successfully commissioned at the Sonae Arauco plant in Portugal.

Pal has for some years been promoting the cascade cleaning system, which it says reduces the footprint of a cleaning system, reduces the use of conveyors and achieves up to 98% efficiency in the removal of pollutants from wood.

That recent Sonae reference processes 40tph of recycled wood for the production of particleboard and requires the installation of two Cyclops machines to clean ferrous metals, non-ferrous metals and heavy pollutants in the micro- and macro-fraction, respectively.

In the last few years Pal says it has made major investments in the NIR technology of the Cyclops which, as a result of optical detection, is capable of separating plastic from chips (even black ones), through a pneumatic ejection system which the company says facilitates the accurate removal of pollutants with minimum wood waste.

Constant research has led to the evolution of this system, says Pal, by integrating it with state-of-the-art detection, as well as mechanical and air-based techniques applied to metals and heavy pollutants, up to the latest achievement represented by the ‘Allin- One’ model. This is capable of eliminating metals, plastics and heavy pollutants, through a single machine and a single processing phase.

When it comes to chips from laminated or coated boards, thanks to a double system of upper and lower video cameras, Pal says it can scan the material from multiple angles, detecting the presence of melamine, PVC, etc, regardless of its location with respect to the transport plane. The company says this allows it to enable its clients to use large quantities of recycled wood in the production of top quality MDF panels. We should not forget the third member of the group, Globus, whose automatic knifesharpening room we reviewed in the April/ May edition of WBPI.

Three companies innovating and working together provide the success story of the Imal-Pal group.

The SMC100 laboratory sample system
Imal's FBC 200 delamination detector
Pal's new Cleaning Tower, with Cyclops detection system
Imal's Pallet Block line