The Grand Elysée Hotel in Hamburg hosted around 345 delegates last month for the 11th edition of the European Wood Based Panels Symposium entitled “Current situations and challenges for the European wood based panel industry”. While this was not quite a record attendance, it was close, and showed definite growth over the previous two editions of this biennial event.

Based on the 335 pre-registered attendees, 31% represented panel manufacturers, with adhesive and chemical suppliers (19%); R&D, teaching, testing, monitoring and certification (19%); plant and measurement engineering (17%), as the other principal sectors.

Germany had the largest number of delegates, with 19 other European countries and 11 overseas countries also represented.

The first presentation was given by Jan Bergmann of Sonae Arauco Deutschland, who said that the last two years had been good for the European industry, driven by economic recovery, robust construction, good labour markets and pay increases above previous levels. Plant utilisation and structural competitiveness had also been good.

However, Mr Bergmann reported that recent months had seen increasing clouds due to the global political situation, rising raw material and energy costs and “industrial challenges”.

The next speaker was Tunga Salthammer of Fraunhofer WKI, looking at formaldehyde in ambient indoor air.

He pointed out that formaldehyde levels are increasing in the outdoor environment, for example, from fuel emissions, and that indoor levels are increased by heating such as log burners, by saunas and even by candles, incense sticks and many other sources, as well as being affected by air exchange rates.

“It becomes clear that the political measures to limit formaldehyde currently face a dilemma,” he concluded. “On the one hand, great efforts are being made to politically impose ever-lower limits on building product emissions and indoor air concentration, while on the other hand, secondary sources, both indoor and outdoor, remain unconsidered.”

Next came Torben Halbe from DFWR Deutscher Forstwirtschaftsrat (the German Forestry Council), whose subject was “How to communicate the scientific evidence that supports using forests for engineered wood”.

He identified three pillars to getting wood’s message across: public relations; lobbying; and internal communication.

During questions, Kris Wijnendaele said that he was increasingly finding that NGOs were in favour of the cascaded use of wood, and against the mass felling of trees for bioenergy, which, he said, is a positive step.

Silvio Mergner of Pöyry Group took to the podium to talk about “Panel production trends: will the role of (waste) wood change?”.

He concluded that the share of high quality waste wood for chipboard production is increasing, but with capacity moving east (in Europe) this trend is less dominant overall. Additional volume appears available for chipboard, MDF and OSB.

Regulations around industrial air emissions and chipboard chemical contamination limits differ among EU member states, although harmonisation is on-going.

Alfred Pfemeter and Raymond Loch, both from Sonae Arauco Deutschland, shared the platform for a presentation on novel 3D wood-based composites.

They explained how 3D post-formable boards of MDF could be made by the addition of a thermo-plastic substance from BASF, via the blowline.

They illustrated both improved moulded shapes such as chairs (normally made in plywood) and 3D relief in panel surfaces (normally routered).

Fabian Fischer of Volkswagen AG kicked off the afternoon session with a surprising, but interesting, talk about wood materials in structural automotive applications.

He concluded that wood and wood materials offer great potential for automotive applications beyond actual “design-only” elements (eg wooden beam fenders/bumpers), but to exploit the potential, research in manufacturing technology, material development and the automotive-specific question of (long-term) material behaviour of wood materials is necessary.

Venla Hemmilä, a PhD student working with IKEA, presented “A step-wise approach to lowering formaldehyde emissions”.

She pointed out that it is not just formaldehyde that is a cause for concern: very volatile organic compounds, volatile organic compounds and even the smell of a product when the customer opens the packaging are all of concern, too.

However, Ms Hemmilä pointed out, we must be careful not to substitute formaldehyde – a natural product anyway – with something worse and untested.

“We don’t specify measurement methods, but IKEA has a reference chamber and our boards must correlate with this,” she said. “IKEA is asking the industry: ‘What would it take to reach half of natural wood emissions, 0.04ppm as a cap value?”

The final speaker of the day was Stefan Weinkötz of BASF and his presentation was entitled “Just the two of us – a new hybrid binder for wood based panels”.

He began by saying that at first glance, UF and pMDI are not really ideal components to combine but that they can act synergistically.

Mr Weinkötz concluded that Kaurit glue plus Kauranat MS 1001 as a hybrid binder for the core layer of chipboard can increase productivity by more than 20%.

Day two kicked off with Sven Englert of Dieffenbacher giving his presentation on “Big Data – Boost or Bluff?”.

He began by explaining what ‘Big Data’ means, first socially: “Big Data is often used as a collective term for digital technologies that are technically credited with a new era of digital communication and processing, and responsible for social change”; and second, economically: “Big Data is the processing of data which are large in amount, complex, and changing with a high velocity”.

Mr Englert stated that: “The analysis of customer data is not necessarily ‘Big Data’!”

He went on to outline the methods of Big Data analysis, or ‘Data Mining’ and gave examples of Big Data and artificial intelligence successes, and failures, in its use. Notable failures are Tay Bot, a Microsoft robot, which started sending highly offensive tweets and Amazon’s Alexis, which accidentally started a party in Hamburg, as well as mistakes in photo image analysis!

For the wood based panels industry specifically, Mr Englert said that Big Data could offer the following benefits: Reduce operating failures; give automatic control of certain processes; enable running of the plant closer to its limits; provide proper statistics; and give deeper insights into the process.

In a complete change of emphasis, the next speaker was Alessandro Guercio of ITI Engineering, a designer and provider of biomass power plants to the wood industry. His subject was “The potential of biomass CHP in wood based panel production” and having outlined the process of biomass CHP thermodynamics, he concluded that the panel industry offers favourable conditions for biomass CHP.

For chipboard and OSB, the drum dryers are replaced by low temperature belt dryers, while in MDF no modifications to the process are required, although a lowering of the heat demand temperature is desirable, he said.

Gregor Bernardy of Siempelkamp talked about self-optimising panel plants and presented his company’s view of the future. It expects significant development in: networked production with vertical and horizontal integration; virtualisation of plants using “digital twins” for simulation of actual lines; and production intelligence, meaning online performance monitoring and preventative maintenance and (model-based) online quality control. The virtualisation means that customers can see their line before placing an order.

“You plan your production: board type/ quality; recipe; quantity production order; and schedule; and the machines carry out your order automatically,” said Mr Bernardy.

Georges Francis of Advachem SA presented on a novel additive for panels – one product with three applications: fire retardant, formaldehyde catcher and hardener.

Dr Francis said that there was a clear need for fire resistant panels and low formaldehyde levels and this meant there was a clear need for a new additive.

His proposal was Advachem CF01 additive. He said that this additive comes in an aqueous state for ease of handling and safe use, while providing the treated panels with both fire resistance and low formaldehyde emissions. Panels’ physical properties, he said, were not compromised, and the additive can tolerate high platen temperatures, meaning that productivity is also not compromised.

Next to take the podium was Stefan Langguth of ACE GmbH. His subject was a novel method of producing lightweight structural panels using PUR foam-cored panels with OSB faces, in a continuous process. This is done by splitting the OSB in half through the thickness, as it leaves the continuous press, and ‘inserting’ the foam core. The sandwich is then passed through a continuous calibrating press. The process can be run at 30m/min he said.

Mr Langguth claimed the process is applicable to OSB, chipboard and MDF/HDF.

Joris Van Acker from Ghent University spoke on “Moisture dynamics as a complementary factor to durability for service life prediction for plywood”. He had carried out a series of scientific tests on plywood under various moisture conditions.

Mr Van Acker advised that no type of plywood so far made has sufficient natural durability – not even tropical hardwood plywood such as sapele-based boards.

“However, oak and some tropical hardwoods do have high resistance to rot and also get less wet and stay wet for less time,” he said.