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History: Solarola Hybrid Lumber Drying & Heat Treatment Kilns
After 20 years of hands-on
experience commercially operating kilns, I was inspired to
design and build our first prototype solar slipkilns in 1996. From
1997 when the first proto-types began commercial production, an
almost continuous series of research and development activities
have been conducted to create the extremely successful and
innovative product that we now offer. As our
success originally became known to those who supplied us green
sawn timber products, the opportunity to sell the technology
became clear to us. As sales were made, the success of our
clients led to an expansion in kiln sales to a point where we
enjoyed Australian market leadership by 2002 when we had sold
over 80 units. Between 1997 and 2002,
accelerating development created a drying system capable of
markedly lower operating costs than any alternative, credible
commercial drying systems. At the same time, with good
supervision our technology produced superior quality outcomes
with lower degrade rates and costs. In cold Australian
locations, one particular pine drying operation routinely dried
pine using solar and gas heating costing less than 30% of the
cost of conventional systems in the same environment.
By then, encouraged by our developing
understanding of the exceptional advantages of solar-cyclic
drying and the general success of our technology we embarked on
our biggest ever R&D project. This work was aimed at higher
levels of control automation, furthering our understanding of
cyclic drying towards development and optimization of control of
the novel prescription that was
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by then known to be the clear cut reason for the higher quality
outcomes that attracted me to solar drying many years earlier.
The outcomes from our 2003-2006 research and
development exceeded our own optimistic expectations and have
led to a situation where a good technology is now an outstanding
one that we believe will soon become world’s best-practice
technology when it becomes known.
Compared to our 1997 models, design changes
have improved solar energy production per cbm capacity fourfold.
A marked simultaneous increase in insulation properties has
combined to increase the energy actually delivered to the
process exponentially.
Not only have we developed an exceptional
system for drying, we have also developed the practical and yet
revolutionary natural drying prescription to compliment it.
Cyclic or “intermittent” drying has implications on the
operation of all conventional low to medium temperature kiln
technologies in the world today. Our innovative generation four
control system compliments the technology exceptionally well.
With patents now in place, our international
commercialization activities have begun with our North American
company Solar Dry Tech Inc having been incorporated in
Vancouver.
Need to know more? Feel free to read further,
email or call for further information.
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