PLAYER DESIGN, INC.
Corinth Pellets contracted PDI to help design a complete wood pellet plant. The wood pellet plant design included a multi-fuel burner, rotary drum dryer, and a discharge/recycle subsystem coupled to existing pelletizers and baggers. The new wood pellet plant was custom designed for integration with the existing pellet mill, replacing a less effective burner and greatly improving the output performance of the plant.
Corinth’s wood pellet plant burner produces 45 million BTUs per hour of thermal energy from roughly 5 tons per hour of fuel. It operates primarily as a wet fuel burner — input consists of white wood (hardwood bark chips) and green fuel (sawmill waste) at about 50% moisture content. As with most PDI burners, the fuel source is almost entirely waste wood and as economical as possible. The ash carryover into the final product is well below 0.5%, leading to a premium pellet fuel.
The wood pellet plant dryer is a 14x60 rotary drum dryer that accepts nearly 36 tons per hour of undried material at 45% moisture and produces 20 tons per hour of dried wood product at 10% moisture. This PDI wood pellet dryer also incorporates an air-recycling cyclone, which recirculates hot air from the dryer outlet back through the inlet, making the process as energy efficient and economical as possible.
For this biomass pellet plant, PDI also provided engineering services, aiding in plant design and assisting in smooth startup and initial product runs. The wood pellet plant burner was designed with custom PLC logic and integrated with the dryer and existing plant facilities. This ensured smooth and automatic operation of the burner and wood pellet plant dryer and guaranteed a successful transition from the previous operation.