Sawmill increases production efficiency 5% with ABB drives

 

image of ABB ACS580

Sawmill increases production efficiency 5% switching to ABB drives

 

When upgrading log feeding, log metering and saw-line angle metering machines with three ABB ACS580 general purpose drives, a sawmill improved production efficiency about five percent for a small investment.

 

Westas Group is the largest, private sawmill company in Western Finland and owns two sawmills that together produce 340,000 m3 high-standard wood raw material annually. The production process takes 3 to 4 weeks and includes several stages, of which drying and preserving the quality of the final product are the most demanding.

 

Conveyors transport the timber first through sorting based on quality and dimension classes. Once selected, a wheel loader takes the logs to the sawing line where they are conveyed to the debarking unit. After that, the logs are scaled and sorted and finally fed into the cutting line in a correct position.

 

Speed and feed control

It means that when products are on a conveyor the speed and feeding must be adapted to the dimensions of the material, and this requires different conveyor speeds which can be achieved using high quality variable speed drives. The electricity savings due to the drives goes directly to the bottom line, and can be monitored with the drives’ built-in energy efficiency calculators monitoring saved kWh, CO2 emissions and money.

 

Built-in maintenance monitoring

Routine maintenance is managed by monitoring the drive’s running hours, motor rotation, consumed kilowatts and cooling fan’s runtime, keeping the process running reliably and helping prevent unplanned downtime.

 

Customer benefits

 – Improve production and energy efficiency: 

Quality end products and reduced waste for better profit using variable speed drives

 

– Reliable process control: 

With the drives, nominal speed increases of 5 to 20 percent are possible to advance accurate speed control without using programmable logic controllers

 

 –  Easy to commission and use: 

The control panel offers a very simple and direct access to all the drive functions

 

Go here for more ABB ACS drives

 

 

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