Supplier of press lines and complete plants for the wood panel industry Siempelkamp has installed its U-flaker at wood panel producer Jiangsu Huidian New Materials’ factory at Shuyang county.
This is Siempelkamp group’s third U-flaker that has been installed in China, two others are being operated at plants in Guangxi and Shandong.
According to Siempelkamp, the Asian market sees the U-flaker machine as “revolutionary” with its capabilities in hybrid board production. Such boards combine a core layer that consists of long and particularly thin flakes with a fine particleboard surface layer.
The U-flaker, developed by Siempelkamp’s subsidiary Pallmann, aims to set new standards for this type of board both in terms of product quality and resource efficiency.
Knife shafts using the one-step flaking process yield a good flake quality with a good bending strength, which means that boards made from this type of flakes are also characterised by a good bending strength.
The flakes are then cut in parallel to the grain to produce longer average lengths and thinner flakes that are of a greater quality.
With the U-flaker, a board weight reduction of between 10-15% is also possible.
Furthermore, glue consumption along with the electrical installed power are reduced when compared with the classic two-stage process, which means lower investments and operating costs for plant operators.
This process allows the use of smaller log diameters of less than 80mm and other wood assortments that would otherwise not be suitable for other direct flaking processes.
This also makes the board manufacturing ecological, since it can process locally available wood species.
Thanks to flaking by knife shafts, optimal wood furnish can be produced from almost any starting material. The U-flaker in Shuyang may therefore be used with almost any type of raw material, such as logs, slabs and cores from the veneer peeling process.
“Both the product properties and our concept’s resource efficiency convince in the market. The large savings in raw materials alone make a significant contribution to our boards’ competitiveness in price-sensitive markets,” said Marc Müller, head of commercial sales, Siempelkamp.
