Rapid assistance at biomass power plant

The town of Brilon in the eastern Sauerland region is not only the most densely forested town in Germany but also home to the largest site of the Egger Group, a leading international wood-based materials manufacturer with over 11,000 employees worldwide. The company produces around 10.4 million m³ of wood-based materials and sawn timber per year. The Brilon plant primarily produces chipboard and MDF boards for the furniture industry and specialist retailers.

A notable feature of the Egger plant in Brilon is its sustainable energy supply. Based on the belief that waste wood is too valuable to simply throw away, the wood is chopped into 40x40 mm pieces in two lines and transported to the company’s own biomass power plant to be used as fuel. The vapor is used to generate electricity via downstream turbines as well as to provide district heating for the sawmill’s drying chambers and other applications. “The plant’s electricity requirements exceed the annual consumption of the town of Brilon, which has around 25,000 inhabitants,” explains Nino Kapsalis, Head of Power Plant and Maintenance at Egger, to illustrate the output. “Thanks to the high efficiency of around 70 to 80%, our energy supply is virtually self-sufficient. However, at the beginning of 2025, it was briefly disrupted when one of the two fuel lines failed, and quick action was needed.”

The outage was caused by two pump failures that occurred in quick succession in the hydraulic power unit of the Pallmann Dracula single-shaft shredder, which shreds 300 metric tons of old wood per day for transport to the biomass chamber. After the first pump suffered damage without warning and had to be replaced, the second pump also failed just a few days later. “No other replacement pump was available, and delivery of the spare part from the US would have taken weeks,” recalls Michael Lenz, who heads up the Mechanics, Power Plant and MDF team at Egger. So, what to do? Nino Kapsalis’s team first reduced the boiler output and then procured a mobile wood chipper to increase the output again. However, the cost of renting this temporary solution was high. Over the total down time, the mobile chipper chopped approximately 2,200 tons of solid fuel.

Further important criteria for Egger were simple technology and high availability of spare parts. “The new drive unit is not only more compact, but also much simpler in terms of design, clearly structured and easier to maintain,” says Lenz. “For us this means maximum process reliability with planned maintenance and optimized spare parts inventory.” Egger also ensures a high degree of availability by means of a 5-year maintenance contract. For the duration of this period, the Hägglunds after-sales service will inspect the installation and provide recommendations for maintenance as required. In addition, the drive units are integrated into Egger’s monitoring system via sensors and control technology, which monitors over 20,000 operating parameters as a complete system for maintenance and process improvements. If needed, Egger also has access to the CytroConnect platform from Bosch Rexroth to implement supplementary data-based services, including predictive maintenance.

As part of the next two overhauls of the biomass boilers, the remaining old drive unit is set to be replaced first, followed by the rental unit. “We assume that these projects will run just as smoothly as the first,” says Lenz. “The rental unit was delivered at 10 am, was put into operation by 7 pm and has been running smoothly ever since.” On the back of the positive experiences it has had so far, Egger has also commissioned Bosch Rexroth with a further modernization project: As part of the next two overhauls, the hydraulics of the push floors, which transport the fuel with a grain size of 40x40 mm from the day bunker to the combustion chamber, are also to be replaced. “We are extremely pleased with the rapid assistance, technical implementation and the overall concept of Bosch Rexroth,” sums up Kapsalis. “The decision to call Hägglunds was exactly the right one.”