Regardless of the time of day and mood

When you ask Theurl’s operations manager Bernd Gasser about the MiCROTEC solutions in use in Assling, he does not even know where to start at first. In recent years, the East Tyrolean timber company has made repeated investments in the latest scanner solutions from the South Tyrolean market leader and has thus established itself as a model company for MiCROTEC customers from all over the world.

“Their openness to innovations, the constructive collaboration and, of course, the geographical proximity make Theurl an ideal partner for many of our newly developed solutions,” Martin Baumgartner from MiCROTEC explains.

At Theurl, both the green and the dry boards are sorted in three lumber plants. MiCROTEC is responsible for the fully automatic sorting logistics which include the Variosort control suite. Inside the youngest of the three machines, the SH3, MiCROTEC also installed a Goldeneye Transverse scanner and the camera-based monitoring system Trueye with its virtual light curtains which optimize and control the production flow. “We developed Trueye in close collaboration with Theurl to evaluate jams and misalignment in front of the distributor and make the necessary optimizations,” Baumgartner tells us, adding that there are only a handful of those systems on the market.

Immediately in front of the Goldeneye Transverse, the dimensions and moisture of each element are determined. “The system uses this information to calculate whether it is a green or a dry board. After that, the scanner changes the settings accordingly,” Gasser explains, who sorts up to 20 different grades of green and dried lumber in the SH3. This also includes all the raw boards for the in-house CLT factory in Steinfeld.

“Equipped with MiCROTEC Ai, the Goldeneye scanner in use at Theurl is one of the most state-of-the-art scanner solutions in the whole of Europe,” Baumgartner explains. Using a large amount of correct data sets, the artificial intelligence learns how to assess certain characteristics, such as knots, resin galls, blue stain or compression wood, which leads to significantly better sorting results.

“For this purpose, we employ a team of around 25 wood experts and forestry scientists who annotate wood characteristics and train the AI,” Baumgartner tells us, adding that this also requires regional fine-tuning, depending on the respective wood quality: “While the bark beetle is rarely an issue for our customers in Scandinavia, it is a central aspect in quality grading in Tyrol.”

With MiCROTEC's acquisition of the North American scanner and AI specialist Lucidyne Technologies in 2020, the lumber evaluation and reporting system QC Assist also found its way to Central Europe. This software is designed to improve the efficiency and quality of lumber evaluations. Each board receives a unique ID number, behind which all collected data are stored on a server. “This makes package checks, for example for the US market, easier. Our customers can also send our grading support team examples of a specific wood feature or defect and thus further increase the scanning performance,” Baumgartner explains. Gasser adds that while Theurl is not active in the US market, QC Assist does make quality assurance easier within the company.

With all of these investments, Theurl is continuously increasing the quality of the sorting process, but also its throughput, as Gasser emphasizes, giving the Goldeneye as an example:

The full article from TIMBER-ONLINE can be found here.