PANEL MANUFACTURING
Invented by PAL over 20 years ago, the Cleaning Tower is a standard cleaning system that may be customised in relation to the type of Recy wood that the customer wants to reutilise. The system is equipped with some versatile machinery which, should there be a drop in quality of the wood at infeed, can be implemented at any time with rapid upgrades and without the need for any structural modifications. A Cleaning Tower consists of a Dynascreen, a patented roll screen which screens the material out into several homogeneous fractions. This is an important operation as the selecting systems downstream can only ensure maximum cleaning efficiency if the dimensions of the material are homogenous. There are also various magnetic devices to remove iron and non-ferrous metals, two pollutants which, if removed separately, can be sold on the market as recycled metals, offering a further source of income and a further reduction in the amount of material to be disposed of. Finer material is cleaned in the Wind Sifter, an air separator designed by PAL, which provides efficiency and accuracy that the separated, pollutant free material, already of the right dimensions, can go straight to the dryer. Next, the new generation cleaning system Cyclops removes any further contamination. Equipped with AI, the cleaning system can be fitted with a variety of sensors such as capacitive sensors to detect metals, RGB camera to detect coloured particles, NIR cameras to detect plastics, and laser sensors to detect MDF, which in conjunction with AI technology processors, activate blades of air and jets of compressed air to remove all the contaminants. Moreover, the Cyclops can also be equipped with patented dual vision technology that enables the mounting
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of sensors both above and below the flow of material, to monitor both surfaces of the Recy wood simultaneously. This allows the consequent removal of the laminated wood on one face only; a solution that is particularly useful for manufacturers who want to produce MDF from Recy wood. Three flows of clean material are received from the Cleaning Tower — microchips, macrochips, and fines that are directed to a dryer. These materials are further refined by the Globus SRD, the new shredder mill with the lowest power requirements and highest capacity available on the market, up to 6 bone dry metric tonnes, purposely designed to process waste material. The structure achieves an ideal distribution of the chips over the whole length of the knife, to reduce wear on wear parts and in the amount of dust produced, whilst still maintaining the sharpness of the blade constant. It is also possible to reduce power requirements with the installation of the SRD by as much as 30% with respect to similar flakers available on the market.
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At the outfeed to the SRD, flakes are conveyed over a series of conveyors to a storage bin. The material, which is still wet at this stage, is then taken to the next step of the process of drying in the IMAL Dynadryer.
36 PANELS & FURNITURE ASIA | SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2024
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