Dtouch - drying has never been so easy

The paper reports experience about an in progress project for the develop of a new control for kiln wood drying process. The control contains a database of standard and special drying schedules and other technological parameters for more than 400 temperate and tropical species. These data, coming from different sources, allow to generate a suitable initial drying schedule for a given species and thickness. A series of functions and algorithms implemented in the control allow to customize the initial schedule by defining the best parameters to obtain a final specific result priority (colour, internal stresses, drying time). The control has auto learning functions for the optimisation of the drying schedule. The expert system is based on the analysis of data process automatically acquired by the control during drying and on input data inserted by the operator at the end of the process answering to a questionnaire related to drying quality and drying kinetic. At the present stage of the project, the debugged beta version of the control is installed in kilns of selected industrial operators involved in the project.