A Barrage of Activities
August 1, 2013 12:11 pm Leave your thoughts
Well, this summer is almost at its end. A mere three and a half weeks more, and I will be essentially finished my summer internship at Millar Western. I will save a summary of my entire summer and experience for my next and final blog.
These past few weeks have been quite interesting, with the start of a new project on the lumber side, an opportunity to look at the centrifuge the mill is trialing and a brief trip to represent the company at K-Days, Edmonton’s annual summer festival.
I have just begun my kiln efficiency trial in collaboration with the managers of Millar Western’s Whitecourt sawmill. This particular project is interesting, simply because it is outside the kind of work I have been doing for the past 3 months at the pulp mill. Having never seen the actual inside of a sawmill and the processes behind the production of lumber, I was surprised by how closely they met my expectations. Simply put, it is almost exactly as you might think it looks: trees come in and are ferried around, cut into boards of varying shape and size, and sorted appropriately. As the name implies, the kilns, the object of the trial, turned out to act just like “giant ovens”.
Now, to the point of the trial: I am examining and recording various lumber properties prior to the product entering the kiln for drying. The lumber dries in one of the three different types of kilns currently in use, for anywhere between 26 and 44 hours. Afterwards, I record the exact same properties as I did before drying and examine the differences between the 2 sets of data in an effort to determine any relationship that could allow the company to save money in the future. This is where the fuel consumption of the kilns comes into play, and, by factoring it into the overall equation, I can assign a monetary figure to each kiln and show which one “works the best.” So far the data has been very intriguing and, hopefully, I will be able to make a useful recommendation before the summer is over.
A picture of the lovely data I am currently analyzing and summarizing to hopefully help Millar Western save on input costs in the future.
Secondly, the centrifuge trial is supposed to take place sometime in the next week. The current sludge presses in our mill separate water from the solid fiber wastes so that the sludge, also called biomass, can be used for other purposes. Currently, our sludge is too wet to be used for much else other than fertilizer for farmer’s fields; in fact, Millar Western gives the sludge away to producers as a soil enhancer, for free. The goal with this centrifuge is to do exactly what the sludge presses are currently doing but to improve de-watering of the resultant solids by as much as 100%. This will allow Millar Western to use the sludge for other purposes, like, perhaps, the generation of power at a local power plant. Hopefully I will have more to tell you about this in my last blog.
Last week I traveled to Edmonton for a day with two co-workers to represent Millar Western at an exhibit at K-Days. AFPA (Alberta Forest Products Association) had set-up its Work Wild display, promoting all the advantages of working in remote forestry communities. The booth had a tree cutting simulator, complete with 2 joysticks and hundreds of wooden blocks with which we built some… umm…. abstract architecture. Due to the fact that Whitecourt, where Millar Western’s forest operations originated and continue to this day, had been named the “Forestry Capital of Canada,” Millar Western was asked if they would like to accompany Work Wild booth and talk to visitors about opportunities in the forest industry. It was a ton of fun, and we had numerous fascinating encounters with people meandering through the exhibits who stopped to ask us what this was all about. It was a great time, and we got to do some hilarious things. Below are several pictures of the random highlights of that day.
The three of us in the Millar Western/Work Wild booths at K-Days.
The tree cutting simulator at the booth. Suspicious Pat is suspicious….
A semi blurry picture of me attempting to bull ride. I’ll have you know that I managed to stay on the entire time.
One of the cool looking designs we made.
As you can see, I’m always wearing my proper PPE.
Overall, the past couple of weeks were amazing, as was the rest of my summer. I am excited to see how much I can cram into these last three weeks and what will end up happening. I will let you know on my next blog what I managed to do and provide an entire summary of my experience this summer. It may end up being fairly lengthy but, hey, I have a lot I want to talk about.
Thanks for reading this, and until next time,
Patrick Pickard