Experience You Can Count On

In a career spanning the time of log rafts from Alaska to the Pacific Northwest coastal pulp mills, chipping 40" diameter logs in a 175" 4 knife gravity feed disc chipper with a 3,500 HP motor, to modern times of chipping 4-10" pre-commercial pine plantation thinnings for wood pellet production, the world has changed in so many ways.  Today I am more likely to see the grandson of the man I first worked with so many years ago still running the family wood chip business.  In the larger mills the people working today often have only a limited appreciation of what the equipment they run was installed to do so many years ago, with more of that tribal knowledge being lost with each retirement.

As a wood scientist I define wood to be a cellular biological anisotropic hygroscopic thermoplastic polymer.  It can be simply a chemical feedstock, or a directly fired fuel, or a granular and particulate precursor for a densified thermal fuel, or a cellular agglomeration needing chemical extraction to make paper,  or many other products.  In developing handling and preparation processes it is vitally important to keep the finished process requirements in mind in order to make the necessary preparations for optimal product performance.  

During the days where coal fired power plants were converting to biofuels it was fun to work with the coal folks as they learned just what a nasty thing biomass fuels really are.  It doesn't flow like coal, it isn't inert like coal, it has strings of bark that hang up in transfers and during reclaiming, and it gets wet, all unlike coal.

My career has taken me around the world in support of mills that use logs and wood to make a product.  Chip export facilities in Australia and New Zealand, rubberwood power plants in Thailand, pulp mills in China and Japan, biomass power plants in Japan, the US, Norway, Sweden and many more, and pulp and paper mills throughout North America, South America, South Africa, Europe, and Russia.  I've worked with chippers of all kinds, grinders and hogs, screens of all types, at low, medium, and high capacities.