Wood industry: incinerators, process heat and heat recovery

The wood and wood-based materials industry works with thermally demanding processes: drying plants, single and multi-stage presses, continuous presses, coating and laminating plants, as well as glue production plants require a permanently stable heat supply with very precise requirements in terms of temperatures, controllability and high availability of well over 8,000 hours per year. At the same time, considerable quantities of residual materials such as bark, trunk sections, wet and dry chips, grinding and sawdust, edge sections and production rejects are produced. These material flows are extremely heterogeneous – with highly fluctuating physical moisture levels and associated inconsistent calorific values, wide particle size distributions and, in some cases, very high ash and foreign matter content. This is precisely where expertise, experience and the design of the combustion and heating surface systems determine the quality, throughput and operating costs of the heat supply. CAW develops and supplies tailor-made, comprehensive system solutions for the entire spectrum of industrial process heat in the wood industry. The focus is on the safe and precise provision of heat using thermal oil heaters and thermal oil systems, hot gases and steam, supplemented by waste heat systems and heat recovery. For sites with their own waste materials, CAW designs highly efficient and robust incinerators for the energetic utilisation of these waste streams. This allows disposal costs to be permanently reduced while at the same time decoupling the plant’s heat supply from fossil fuels. TNV systems thermally clean exhaust air streams from drying, coating and resin processes, thereby recovering heat. In energy-optimised concepts, economisers and shell-and-tube heat exchangers are used to preheat feed water, thermal oil or process air. Where a suitable and economically viable level of waste heat is available, an ORC system can also generate electrical energy.