Title: Establishing and comparing electrical energy consumption of sawmills

Authors: Dayakar Devaru; Ramakrishna Maddula; Bhaskaran Gopalakrishnan

Addresses: Department of Industrial and Production Engineering, JSS Science and Technology University, Mysuru-570006, India ' Johnson Controls, 2315 Commerce Center Dr d, Rockville, VA 23146, USA ' Department IMSE, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26508, USA

Abstract: Quantity of energy required to produce a unit of product or specific energy consumption (SEC) is an important aspect to lumber producing sawmills since it can also represent production efficiency to some extent. The current research focuses on establishing SEC profiles for hardwood lumber sawing in sawmills and comparing them with SEC of other sawmills. Benchmarking energy consumption will help the sawmill industry to know where it stands against industrial bests and realise how to improve their energy efficiency and productivity. SEC was calculated in the traditional way initially by taking total energy consumption from energy bills and dividing it by total board feet sawn. Sawmills produced different lumber sizes which affected energy consumption and hence a method based on surface area cut was developed to calculate SEC. Better results were obtained by SEC calculated based on surface area cut since it exposed production bottle necks than traditionally calculated SEC.

Keywords: sawmills energy profiling; lumber sawing; wood processing; lumber surface area; sawmill motors; sawmill productivity improvement; electrical data logging; energy efficiency; sawmills benchmarking; sawmill process management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAMS.2020.105299

International Journal of Applied Management Science, 2020 Vol.12 No.1, pp.23 - 49

Received: 28 Mar 2018
Accepted: 18 Dec 2018
Published online: 24 Feb 2020 *

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