The Southern Forest Products Association is proud to welcome American Wood Dryers as an associate member!
American Wood Dryers designs, builds, and installs high-efficiency, high-quality dry kilns with installations throughout the world. Designs incorporate quality materials such as ALCLAD aluminum panel sheeting and Themax closed-cell rigid foam insulation. The Modular Panels Design reduces installation labor and operating costs in terms of energy and maintenance.
Package kilns are supplied for smaller volumes of high-value hardwood. Track Kilns are designed for large volume, high temperature, and high throughput softwood mills. Track Kilns can be batch or continuous. Continuous track kilns can be a counter flow design or American Wood Dryers’ newly patented Single Pass, one-way flow, which produces a higher grade of lumber at lower energy costs.
Kiln enclosures, both package and track types, are designed for each application and can be all-aluminum structures with ALCLAD aluminum panel surfaces and R20 insulation or all-stainless steel in special cases.
Continuous kilns are typically a combination of aluminum construction in the cold sections and steel in the hot section for economy of material costs.
Heat systems vary from hot water or steam coils in hardwood kilns with larger steam systems in conifer kilns, as well as thermal oil coils, direct-fired natural gas furnaces, and green or dry wood waste-fired systems with optional natural gas backup burners.
Air circulation systems are designed for each application and can be direct drive specialized kiln-duty motors mounted inside the kiln or standard motors mounted external to the kiln chamber. In most cases, motors are driven by variable frequency drives to adjust airflow to match kiln schedule requirements and reduce electric power costs.
The Continuous Dry Kiln (CDK) design has become especially prevalent in the Southern Pine industry. This design provides increased throughput and higher efficiency by taking advantage of the stored heat in the lumber and the chamber humidity to preheat the entering lumber while conditioning the exiting product.
American Wood Dryers’ proprietary Drystar Kiln Control is a PC-based system that provides flexible and intuitive operation when processing high-value materials to exact specifications. Drystar II is a PLC-based control system and is supplied for high-production conifer kilns.
American Wood Dryers also provides dehumidifiers, pre-dryers, steamers, and specialty drying systems for non-wood materials.
Learn more at drykilns.com.