Solidiwood process technology

It should be noted that resource efficiency is already at the heart of the business logic of Finnish and European resource-intensive industry. The focus will shift increasingly from products to intangible and less resource-intensive services. Solidiwood process technology gives concrete form to all three of the world’s megatrends: automation, energy efficiency and production efficiency.

The technology is well suited for use not only by large and medium-sized but also by small technology and wood products companies.

Sawn timber in any form – such as green, dried, unplaned, planed, heat-treated, or water-glass- or salt-impregnated – is suitable for further processing in the Solidiwood process.

The sawn timber required can be bought from sawmills green or shipping dry, either cut to fixed length or in a form that can be finger-jointed in the Solidiwood process. A longer-term alternative is to procure product-specifically tailored sawlogs from forest companies and saw them with a Veisto or similar profiling sawing machine, ideally feeding them directly into the infeed equipment of Solidiwood process technology units.

Also radically new compared with traditional further processing of sawn timber is that the pre-profiling of the product and its components can make use of a capability of modern sawing technology that remains almost unused: profiling the product already at the sawing stage.

Of course, it can also be worthwhile to carry out pre-profiling for Solidiwood production as a separate machining operation, e.g. with a planer. There are also products for which no pre-profiling is needed.

Compared with current techniques, Solidiwood process technology reduces sawn timber consumption by as much as several tens of per cent. At the same time, this means avoiding the Solidiwood production and costs corresponding to the saving, while still producing the same volume of products as current techniques.

The saving in sawn timber comes from the elimination of chip-removing machining; from face and edge straightening, profiling, patching and dimensioning by hot pressing; and from the high-yield sawing of the parts of multi-part products and the shape of their cross-section. Finger-jointing and/or patching of defects also help to achieve the desired quality of the product material.

The depletion and rising cost of raw materials make energy- and material-efficient business increasingly profitable and give rise to entirely new kinds of innovation.

Solidiwood production is closer to metal and synthetic materials production than to current wood processing. This is a wood products factory with no chip-removing machining. The raw material, sawn timber, ends up entirely in the product.

Despite their production technology, Solidiwood products retain the natural lightness of the wood, comparable to that achieved with traditional kiln drying. This is due above all to the exceptionally short lead time of the process, but also to the temperature, which is optimised to be lower than in conventional heat treatment.

The temperature can be raised if a more conventional heat treatment and a browner colour are desired for the products.