Location: GLO - Global
This dataset covers the treatment of wood in automated spraying and deluging/flow coating equipments. The automated spraying and deluging/flow coating process is considered to be a surface treatment and not a deep penetration treatment.
Automated spraying is mostly applied at sawmills and carpentry shops, whereas deluging systems mainly operate in carpentry shops. Unlike all other industrial treatment processes, sawmill treatments aim to preserve wood in the short-term. Freshly cut wood is treated with fungicides to prevent the discoloration caused by blue stain forming fungi. This coloration depreciates the value of the wood.
Carpentry shops on the other hand fabricate wooden construction materials and treat them for long term protection against insects and fungi, e.g. by applying wood preservatives as primers before further surface treatment.
Despite some small differences in the operation and infrastructure, dipping/immersion applied by the two industrial sectors can be described by a generic "automated sparying/deluging" emission scenario (OECD 2000, p.29ff).
Automated spray/deluge systems consist of longitudinal or transversal boxes that apply a (sometimes diluted) preservative to the wood on a continuously moving convey or belt.
In the case of automated spraying,the sawn timber enters the spraying box that applies the preservative to the surface of the wood for a period of 3 - 5 seconds. The particle size of the spray is a critical parameter for the effectiveness of the treatment. Spray boxes are relatively contained. Splashguards surround the spraying boxes to eliminate any droplets of spray from the rest of the mill area. Droplets are large enough to prevent the respiration of preservative solution.
After the spray boxes, the treated wood is stacked or sorted and put into the yard for shipment off-site. At sawmills, the treated wood does not remain in storage for long time periods. Wood is generally shipped off-site to manufacturers within 2-3 days after treatment. Longer storage periods occur at carpentry shops (adapted from OECD 2000).
Deluging/flow coating is a comparable automated method of applying industrial liquid coatings that involves directing numerous individual streams of coating over one or multiple parts that move horizontally on a conveyor, e.g. during wood window manufacturing. Flow coating can be used to cover multi-dimensional surfaces of a variety of shapes. The run-off paint or wood preserverative is recollected and reused.
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The following picture shows an installation for encapsulated automatic spraying as, e.g. used in sawmills:
Undefined unit processes (UPRs) are the unlinked, multi-product activity datasets that form the basis for all of the system models available in the ecoinvent database. This is the way the datasets are obtained and entered into the database by the data providers. These activity datasets are useful for investigating the environmental impacts of a specific activity (gate-to-gate), without regard to its upstream or downstream impacts.