The management of wood waste products, the most voluminous kind, and the development of suitable revalorisation systems, is the primary focus of the TRISPIRABOIS project. The project will result in the development of a technological building block towards the qualitative automatic sorting of wood waste in industrial conditions. This development has been undertaken on the basis of the current and future requirements of users of wood waste. The users of the technical systems developed in the course of the project are wood waste management companies and in particular companies making use of wood.
The main technological innovation of this optimised sorting system involves the fine scale and advanced use of Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) to pull a flow of wood waste according to the nature of the pollutants. This fine sorting requires optimisation of the spectral range used and the optical assembly and the development of new processing algorithms. These developments are integrated via the fabrication of a wood-dedicated industrial optical core composed of a spectrometer and its optimised lighting system, associated with processing software (see figure for an exampleof the sorting machine).
To guarantee keeping in phase with market needs, the project is being run by one of the main users of the sorted material (EGGER Panneaux & Décors), and includes among the partners the leading French company for the design of sorting machines (Pellenc ST). The strength of this research and industrial transfer project is derived from the bringing together of scientific competencies in NIRS, chemometry and signal processing, sorting and industrial valorisation of wood waste, in-depth knowledge of wood and its additives alongside the other partners, CRITT Bois, LCPME (Laboratoire de Chimie Physique et de Microbiologie pour l’Environnement) and CRAN (Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy).
The project, launched in 2013, has a budget of 2.5 m euros, for a duration of 3 years. It has received funding under the joint ministerial fund call for projects (FUI15), with additional funding from local authorities.
