Further processing of sawn timber: towards a Solidiwood process industry

Small-scale equipment piloting project and design of industrial production units

It is time to make Solidiwood process technology available first and foremost for the benefit of our society and our industry. This should be launched with small-scale equipment piloting of the key mass-market products of Solidiwood product groups 1 and 2. In this connection, it is worth studying the document containing Teijo Ruuth’s implementation plan: the Pilot project budget calculation.

The small-scale equipment pilot project is needed in particular to enable, through Solidiwood process technology and product trials, the best possible production for each product down to the last detail, and to produce small sample products for testing and marketing. The equipment in question is also needed on a permanent basis, i.e. whenever there is a need to try out a new product, function, wood species, adhesive or surface-treatment agent, or some other better partial or overall solution. This means product-specific optimisation.

It is also essential that the use of the small-scale equipment alone provides the information needed for designing and manufacturing industrial production equipment. Of course, the small-scale equipment can also be built longer if the product so requires. This makes it possible to further verify the product through trial use in its intended applications.

The single most important factor in acquiring Solidiwood technology is the basic premise of the Solidi joint concept, which serves the national interest: Solidiwood’s R&D, and in particular the manufacture of Solidiwood presses, must take place permanently in Finland.

Solidi Finland should therefore authorise as its joint-concept companies the Finnish companies with the best design and manufacturing capacity. Their induction and authorisation will be carried out in cooperation with Teijo Ruuth. These companies are needed to ensure a reliable and exponentially growing delivery capability for Solidiwood’s complete technology, in preparation for the coming conquest of global market leadership. It is also important that their existing customer base already includes wood products industry companies that will take Solidiwood process technology into use.

The loading and unloading equipment for the presses and the product packaging equipment can also be manufactured. Results will begin to emerge when the task is assigned to companies in the field as subcontractors to the companies described above.

It is in the interests of Veisto Oy and its sawing-machine competitors to start upgrading their existing and new sawing machines to produce pre-profiled sawn timber for Solidiwood’s main production. Veisto’s competitors are found in Sweden, Germany and North America.

The basic idea of Veisto’s method is to chip, saw and edge a log into finished sawn timber in one single sawing machine: the company has 100 years of expertise.

Most essential of all is that making use of the Solidi joint concept and Solidiwood process technology is in the interests of all those mentioned above and of their Solidiwood customers. One must not stand still, nor unwittingly be left carrying the greatest risk.

Statement on the deployment of Solidiwood^®process technology

I am convinced that, in cooperation with the technology industry, I can design and supply R&D and production equipment applying Solidiwood technology that implements Solidiwood’s technical and production functions. I have an in-depth knowledge of Solidiwood process technology. I have been familiarising myself with it since the beginning of 2016.

I am Teijo Ruuth, a mechanical design engineer. I have more than 45 years of wide-ranging experience in designing and supplying machinery and production lines for various industries. I have worked as a designer, R&D engineer, and design and project manager at companies including Raute Oyj and Makron Oy, which manufacture presses and other woodworking machinery, and subsequently as an independent entrepreneur at Fertema Oy and Constru Oy, which I founded.

Lahti, 15 October 2023

Teijo Ruuth

Solidiwood technology should be turned into an industry

Large companies in particular are returning to producing plain sawn timber, i.e. to bulk production.

The aim of developing the compact Solidiwood process technology has been, and remains, to create a radically resource-efficient sawn timber further-processing industry and thereby gain an overwhelming competitive advantage for the wood products industry and the technology industry serving it, as well as for wood construction and the improvement of environmental values.

The Solidi Finland business ecosystem / Solidiwood process technology, which gives concrete form to the bioeconomy, cleantech and digitalisation written into the Government Programme as the spearheads of our country’s economic growth, must be made available first and foremost to our country and our companies in particular, for use in global competition against traditional business / production technology.

The speed and breadth of deploying Solidiwood process technology should be put before everything else. There is no justification for delaying the start of generating results. An overall result of an entirely different order of magnitude compared with traditional investments will be lost by prolonging the timeline and limiting investment.

What is essential is that the profit drivers of the Solidiwood business have been identified. They are known. The question now is putting them to use. The more companies there are investing, the more the costs per company decrease. For example, narrower specialisation of targets, cooperation between companies and learning from one another are in everyone’s interest.

The operations of the Solidi Finland business ecosystem can be brought to exponential growth as its digital platform ecosystem is built and its Solidiwood technology is turned into an industry.

The sawn timber needed for Solidiwood production is purchased from sawmills, mainly green and cut to length, or in a form suitable for finger-jointing in the Solidiwood process. Procurement should be based on long-term contracts under which part of the sawlogs is harvested product-specifically and sawn on a profiling sawing machine that the sawmill already has or that has been converted from an existing one.

Solidiwood production becomes particularly profitable when it is targeted at small-diameter sawlogs, i.e. cheaper wood that may even be classed as pulpwood. In the Solidiwood process, this sawn timber – sawn by profiling at a high yield and, according to research by the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), well suited even to load-bearing structures – is used to produce in particular the massive glued products of product group 2. Another similarly profitable target is through-and-through sawing of large logs to be processed in the Solidiwood process into product group 1 products, i.e. multi-purpose board products, and into log panels profiled from the outer parts of the log for log wall elements.

Quality grading of the sawlogs, supplemented where necessary by butt-joint lengthening and/or patching of the sawn timber in the pressing process, makes it possible to achieve the desired quality of the end products.

A radically new option, offering more profitable and larger-scale production, is to build dedicated Solidiwood sawing units.

Sawing, carried out as a continuation of the debarking that precedes the Solidiwood sawing unit, is done with a profiling sawing machine and, as far as possible, directly into the infeed equipment of the Solidiwood process technology units. Straightening the end faces of the end products and trimming them to the specified length take place in the Solidiwood process by pressing.

Solidiwood sawing units do not need the land areas, buildings and equipment located before and after today’s sawing machines, such as log sorting, length trimming / quality grading of sawn timber, dimension sorter, stacker, kilns, destacking of stickered loads, packaging and storage, nor transport to further processing.

From eucalyptus plantations in particular, it would be advantageous to harvest the sawlogs best suited to Solidiwood production, with the rest and the sawmill chips going to pulp production. Eucalyptus is really cheap compared with sawlogs. So far, however, it has not been possible to produce much from it other than pulp.

Veisto Oy, at least, successfully piloted its sawing machine for sawing eucalyptus wood with very high internal stresses as early as around 2010. The problem, however, is the lack of industrial deployment of Solidiwood 2-3D process technology capable of drying / further processing even such difficult sawn timber. The very starting point for its development is what Junckers Oy in Denmark has applied to stress-prone beech for more than 60 years: large-scale industrial 1D press drying.

Combating climate change and biodiversity loss

Solidiwood wood product production and pricing should be targeted at high volume, i.e. for use by ordinary citizens, also from the perspective of combating climate change and biodiversity loss. Keeping prices below the level obtainable on the market is compensated by the increasingly exponential growth in sales and in the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss – and the lower the price level is kept, the greater this growth.

Deploying the Solidiwood sawing unit and, in particular, Solidiwood process technology reduces global warming and biodiversity loss in proportion to the growth in technology / wood product production of Solidi Finland’s joint-concept companies.

The construction and real estate sector is the largest industry in the world, and its carbon footprint is also by far the biggest. According to Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, building with wood would reduce the consumption of natural resources by as much as 50 per cent and emissions by 60 per cent.

All of the above also results in growth in the demand for, price of and competitiveness of sawn timber against other materials used in processed products. Sawn timber has only truly been sold and priced once it has been sold as value-added products.

All this is prompting the world’s nations to support Solidiwood investments by domestic and foreign companies that are nationally beneficial to them too, and even to pay the Finnish state for its investment in producing radically profitable technology / environmental benefit.

Forests sequester carbon

With Solidiwood sawing and further-processing technology, the amount of sawlogs needed to produce the same volume of products as with current techniques is approx. 30 % smaller. As far as Solidiwood production in Finland is concerned, this means an approx. 10 % lower need for forest harvesting than at present.
For one of the main volumes, i.e. the production of Solidiwood building elements, small-diameter sawlogs, which are priced higher than pulpwood, are used. This increases willingness to carry out more thinnings. This in turn increases the growth of sawlog timber, i.e. forest growth, i.e. carbon sequestration.
For the other main volume, i.e. the production of Solidiwood wide-board products, large sawlogs are used. This increases willingness to grow trees larger. This in turn increases forest growth, i.e. carbon sequestration.

Accelerating the low-carbon transition of industry

Competing industries, such as the concrete, brick, steel, aluminium, laminate and plastics industries, are highly carbon-intensive. Solidiwood increases wood construction and also captures market share from the above-mentioned industries.
The Solidiwood sawing and further-processing industries need over 50 % less land, buildings, machinery and energy than the current, already low-carbon industry in the sector.
The above-mentioned smaller sawlog requirement of Solidiwood also means approx. 30 % less processing production and transport than at present.
Solidiwood hollow-core elements substantially reduce the weight of a building and save heat compared with traditional solid-wood elements.
Compared with today's wood products, the need for glue in Solidiwood surfacing products is zero, apart from any end finger joints, and in Solidiwood elements it is also very small.

Growth in wood construction binds ever more carbon

Wood products retain their stored carbon
The longer service life of Solidiwood products prolongs carbon storage.

J.W. Snellman: “Every nation lives for its own interests, and in this it does right. Its aspirations, however, will succeed only if its own interests are united with the interests of humanity.” Sauli Niinistö: “The most important of our pillars is the national one. Its development is most, and most directly, in our own hands.”

Finnish forest industry companies in particular would do well to build a great deal of Solidiwood wood product manufacturing of all kinds abroad as well.

Piloting

The topographic and smooth surfaces of a paraffin-coated decking board.

Now is the time to make Solidiwood process technology available for use by our society and our industry. This should begin with piloting the key products of Solidiwood production, namely wide flooring, decking, interior cladding and exterior cladding boards (= multi-purpose boards), as well as intermediate floor and wall elements; see the Pilot project budget calculation.

The picture shows a Solidiwood product with topographic and smooth surfaces that has been straightened by hot pressing, stress-relieved, heat-treated and surface-treated with paraffin in a manner akin to pressure impregnation. Compare this with the German Dauerholz, which is merely finger-jointed and impregnated with paraffin, and yet has a recommended retail price 4 x that of an ordinary heat-treated decking board.

Small-scale equipment piloting is particularly needed in order to establish, through experiments on the details of the technology / products, the best production method for each product. At the same time it yields additional information needed for designing the production presses, as well as small sample products for marketing.

What is essential is that, as a rule, the technology industry carries out the R&D, demonstration and piloting phase, i.e. produces the technology ready for exploitation.

The single most important factor is to get press manufacturers designing presses together with Teijo Ruuth and Solidi Finland Oy as soon as possible. This is the most effective and productive way of demonstrating that the technology can be put into use.

The quality and cost-efficiency of Solidiwood wood products depend precisely on the technical level of the presses. It makes most sense to design and produce Solidiwood press units tailored to each application area / product.

The press loading and unloading equipment can also be developed and built with existing know-how. Results will start to emerge once the task is assigned to Teijo Ruuth and companies in the sector.

DECKING BOARD PRICES DECKING BOARD MATERIAL WASTE AND THICKNESS ABOUT DAUERHOLZ PRODUCTS

Virtual models and simulation can help

(T&T magazine 11.11.2016, Aki Kulmala, ABB Oy)

“Virtual prototypes of the machines, or of the entire production line, must be available at every stage of the project. It must be possible to test the desired functions and solutions quickly and virtually, without real equipment.

A virtual model makes it possible to try out functionalities and innovations as early as the development or prototype stage. It makes design efficient, and testing and commissioning fast. When problems are detected and corrected while still on the drawing board, production downtime during commissioning is kept as short as possible.

Simulation can be used to test the effects of various changes on production volumes and costs or, for example, on energy efficiency.

Virtualisation brings efficiency. The tools for it already exist.”

(Etteplan Oy): “A virtual model makes it easier for experts from different fields to take part in the product development process. Software developers, mechanical designers and user interface developers, for example, can work simultaneously around one and the same digital twin.

In the world of the digital twin, different concepts and how well they work can be tested step by step in the future operating environment of the real, physical product. By comparing concepts, it is possible to find the right solution, which is then taken further in product development towards the final product.”

(Siemens Oy): “With a digital twin, a product or its manufacturing process can be virtually tested, analysed, optimised and commissioned before the physical equipment exists, without prototypes.

Once the digital twin has been commissioned and connected to the real production line, any changes can first be tested digitally and only then implemented in the actual process.”

(Talouselämä 24.10.2018): “A visual simulation can be built from the digital twin, which the company can use to present a new product to the customer. It can even be used to train the equipment's users before a single physical machine exists.

Once the equipment is at the customer's site, the virtual twin helps to optimise and develop its use.”

Towards a Solidiwood process industry

Small-scale equipment piloting project and design of industrial production units

Statement on the deployment of Solidiwood^®process technology

Solidiwood technology should be turned into an industry