Thames timber is a large wood processing company that mills, kiln dries, and moulds wood for export to the USA. As part of a drive to improve energy efficiency and cost save they needed a system to take kiln dried block waste off there optimiser lines and turn it into chip that could be mixed with the wet wood waste from the mill and be burnt in the boiler system to improve the calorific value of the wet wood currently used to fire the boilers.

Our solution was to convey the block waste to a central point and feed this waste through a chipper and load the chip into an open top container via a fan and cyclone ready for transport to the mill site (3kms away). There was a fan and cyclone on site that was redundant, which was incorporated into the waste system along with a rebuilt chipper, and P&W manufactured conveyors and chipper mount stand.

There are six conveyors in the system using 400mm wide belts and are up to 30m in length. There are five 90 degree turns along the length of the conveyors that drop and turn the boards to align them with the next conveyor. The conveyors run at 30m/min in this installation, which means that there are only single boards transferring up the belts to avoid bridging and jams.

Two of the six conveyors collect the waste from each of the two optimisers. Block waste exits the waste chute at the rear of the optimiser and off the end of the optimiser out feeds at approx 100m/min. Each of these conveyors then transfer the waste onto three separate conveyors that run along the rear walls of the factory and the drop on to a elevator conveyor. The elevator conveyor rises to eight metres over the last thirty metres of travel to drop the wood into the chipper and through the fan and cyclone into the open top container.

Total conveyor length 113 metres.