The biggest change is about innovative technology. That’s the message from Paul Lingemann, sawmill manager at Egger Brilon, which put Germany’s first TC continuous kiln into operation in 2016 – a facility that is currently drying 100,000 cubic meters (42 MMBF) per year, but has the capacity to increase to more than 120,000 cubic meters (51 MMBF).

Among other things, you’ll get the chance to see a demonstration of our latest control system, Valmatics 4.0. With Valmatics 4.0, you can automate and optimize drying in all types of lumber kilns. High process quality is assured by simulators programmed with data from hundreds of thousands of measurements that enable the calculation of drying processes with unbeatable accuracy from beginning to end. All this to avoid costly running-in time of new programs.

Lumber drying is one of the most quality-critical processes in the sawmill production process. Valutec announces the launch of its Valmatics 4.0 control system, developed for industry 4.0, which will enable sawmills around the world to automate and optimize drying in all types of lumber kilns. The high quality of the process is ensured by simulators programmed with data from hundreds of thousands of measurements to enable the calculation of drying processes with unbeatable accuracy from beginning to end.

In the extensive work of creating Valmatics 4.0, an important task has been to ensure functionality over time.
"We want sawmills to switch to Valmatics 4.0 because they can see benefits that will help them develop - not that they are forced to because of hardware changes,” says John Karbin, Automation Manager at Valutec.