The Malaysian fiberboard manufacturer, Segamat MDF, commissioned us to supply a biomass combustion plant to supply its production with steam and process heat. When designing the plant, the fuels, in addition to the company's own production waste, should be  Waste from oil mills in the form of palm fibers should also be taken into account in order to avoid using natural wood as fuel.   

The client's ecological demands placed special demands on the engineering: Palm fibers, which should be used as a replacement for wood up to 40%, cause caking on heating surfaces in conventional incineration systems, which has an unfavorable effect on the performance of the system and ultimately result in increased maintenance costs.

In order to overcome the engineering disadvantages of this fuel, which arise from the comparatively low sintering temperature of the ash, low combustion temperatures had to be designed. This required larger grate surfaces, increased combustion chamber volume and specially designed waste heat boilers for heating thermal oil. The use of the air-cooled INTEC moving grate as the main firing system, supplemented by dust and granulate burners, enables the use of fuels with widely varying fuel moisture levels.

When designing the system, a heat transfer oil circuit was chosen as the energy distribution system to transmit 9.2 MW of thermal energy. From a zero pressure collector, transfer pumps supply the MDF press as well as coating systems and the steam generator, in which saturated steam is generated for the refiner. By using the residual energy of the exhaust gas to dry the wood fibers, a system efficiency of approx. 98% is achieved.