Brazil's industry leader upgrades with no.1 transverse lumber scanner
Since 1952, Berneck has been a major player in Brazil's wood processing industry. The company is rated as the most modern saw and planer mill in the country and ranks among the global technological leaders.
To increase productivity and lead the global market, the planer mill in Curitibanos has been recently equipped with the Goldeneye 900 transverse scanner by Microtec, the first of its kind in South America. Springer, a leading sawmilling provider of conveyor systems for lumber handling, installed all mechanical parts.
In order to increase production capacity in the dry-sorter and planer line for quality grading of boards at the Curitibanos plant, Berneck decided to invest in new software and machinery. While Microtec delivered all lumber quality scanning and optimization devices, as well as PLC control, Springer planned the mechanical components. With a feeding speed up to 1.8 m/sec in transversal feeding that is max. 165 boards per minute at 640 mm (25 inch) lug space, this installation is the fastest and most modern planer mill in South America.
The heart of this new industrial unit in Curitibanos is Goldeneye 900 Multi-Sensor Quality Scanner in transverse feeding for dry sorting. Goldeneye 900 scans the boards in a single scan frame from top and bottom with 4-side visual inspection including dimension, scatter and grain deviation and color. Right after the Goldeneye 900 scanner, a trimmer station with two saws on either side of the board, cuts the boards to the final length for packaging.
“The great advantage of the production with Goldeneye 900 is to perform the measuring and quality selection in transverse feeding. This new technology provides reliable results even at a high throughput speed increasing our added value”, comments Fernando Gnoatto.
The planer line also features an inline moisture meter M3 Scan that determines the board’s moisture to check if the degree of moisture content is within the thresholds. Immediately after the scanner there is the first Microtec Viscan Strength Grader in Brazil equipped with an X-ray device that determines the density of the boards and predicts the strength by automatically sorting the boards into strength classes. The sorting process is carried out by Variosort Lumber Sorter, the fully automated Microtec software that supervises sorting, packaging and wrapping of the boards. Variosort’s data interface communicates with Viscan Strength Grader, Moisture Meter as well as the Multi-Sensor Quality Scanner Goldeneye 900 for a reliable board tracking.
