Using air drying prior to kiln drying of the lumber offer a great potential of energy savings and productivity increase by reducing kiln drying operation time. The present FORAC drying energy tool will help the production manager of a lumber mill to develop a strategy for planning the usage of air drying operations in combination with kiln programs in order to improve the overall efficiency of the drying operations. The final strategy will specify for which products to make use of air drying, at which period of the year and in combination with which kiln (possibly using different technologies) and kiln program. All of this is done taking into consideration the planning production schedule, the availability of green lumber and the storage and kiln capacity. This tool was developed with collaboration of FORAC Consortium (Université Laval).

Notice for the tool installation
The file to download is a .zip file. You first have to unzip that file and then, double-click on the file entitled "setup.exe" to launch the installation of the tool. A new start up program menu entitled "Kiln Drying Planning Tool" under "FORAC" will be created. If you accept all the default options of the installation, the program will install itself in the default "Program Files" Windows directory under "FORAC\Kiln Drying Planning Tool\".