SCANNING & OPTIMISATION – On the frontline
Production hotting up in Chile
Quebec-based
supplier, Autolog, has helped a South American sawmill cut back on its costs in the face of tighter margins
The control point at the Chilean mill W
ith the wood industry still struggling with the slow economy, any
technical innovation that can reduce the operating cost of a production line is welcome. Armed with only one optimiser and some innovative thinking, Autolog and a major lumber producer in Chile made the decision last year to team-up and fully optimise an edger/trimmer line. Though executed in 2011, this
story began 10 years ago when Autolog, a control and
optimisation company located in Blainville, designed an ultra violet code printer and reader system to track board solutions for their linear planer optimiser.
The concept for that design was to linearly optimise a board after a planer and be able to track the solution until it gets on a lug chain passed the lug loader. In theory, the solution was quite simple: print a code on the board and read it when needed. In fact, the process of designing a reliable and rugged system took a decade. Ultra violet ink is used so the ID code printed on the boards is invisible to the human eye. Each board going through the planer optimiser is marked with a unique ID number and that number is linked to the board solution so when a board gets on lugs after the board dealer, a top/bottom code reader reads the ID code,
In the concept of the Chilean mill, all the boards going to one of the edger lines ran through the trimmer optimiser first so the Autolog engineers set-up the trimmer system with two independent optimiser computers – one running a trimmer and the other an edger application – Autolog
retrieves and transfers the solution to the line PLC without
the risk of being out of step with the greater line.
18 International Forest Industries | FEBRUARY/MARCH 2012
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