New Zealand’s Fletcher Building Limited has ordered a complete CEBRO plant for the production of Fine OSB from German machine and plant manufacturer DIEFFENBACHER. The plant will be built at Fletcher Building’s Laminex site in Taupo, in the center of the country’s North Island. In Fletcher Building’s efforts to support New Zealand’s goal of a low-carbon circular economy, the new plant will include DIEFFENBACHER’s new, highly sustainable Belt Dryer.
The new Belt Dryer is just one example of how DIEFFENBACHER technology will support the sustainability of the new plant. Along with digitalization, advanced plant engineering and operational excellence, sustainability is one of the four pillars of DIEFFENBACHER’s smart plant concept CEBRO. The Belt Dryer has a low thermal energy consumption. It works at lower temperatures than drum dryers and can use low-calorific energy from the waste heat of other plant components that would otherwise remain unused. Furthermore, it can be used in combination with cogeneration.
“It’s only a small part of our new plant, but the Belt Dryer is a perfect example of DIEFFENBACHER’s advanced solutions,” says Paul Thorn, Fletcher Wood Products, Capital Works Manager at Fletcher Building. “We chose DIEFFENBACHER for this important project because we are assured that they will help us move our business forward.”
Fletcher Building’s new CEBRO plant will have the flexibility to produce Fine OSB and OSB. Fine OSB is a special type of board consisting of an OSB core layer with fine wood fibers on the outer surfaces. This product combines OSB’s excellent mechanical properties with an incredibly smooth surface finish.
Besides the new Belt Dryer, DIEFFENBACHER will supply an energy plant, a debarking line, purchased material infeed, strand production, a MAIER Impact Mill, the screening and air grading, material recovery, glue preparation, glue dosing and gluing systems, the forming station and forming line, a CPS+ continuous press with Press Emission Control System, raw board handling, pneumatic systems, electrics and automation, the digitalization solution EVORIS and the digital service platform MyDIEFFENBACHER. In addition, DIEFFENBACHER subsidiary B. Maier Zerkleinerungstechnik GmbH is responsible for engineering the entire wood yard up to the strander.
The new CEBRO plant will replace a particleboard production line featuring an almost 50-year-old single-opening press supplied by DIEFFENBACHER to Fletcher Building in 1974. “It’s remarkable that our old press served us so well and for so long. With the right maintenance, we believe our new DIEFFENBACHER plant will last at least as long,” says Thorn. Construction in Taupo will begin in early 2024. Start-up is scheduled for the fourth quarter of the same year, and full-scale production by mid-2025.
