Modeling and simulation of moving wood chips and resin droplets within a resinating mixer using lattice gas cellular automata

Abstract

In this paper a model for the movement of wood chips and resin droplets within a resinating mixer is presented. The mixing of wood chips and resin droplets is a sub-process, which is called gluing or resin metering, of the manufacturing process of particleboards. The aim of this sub-process is to equally distribute the resin on the wood chips. As the process of gluing is not completely understood, two arising research questions are “How is the resin distributed across the surface of the wood chips?” and “How much resin penetrated into the wood particles?”. These aspects can hardly be determined using real experiments. A mathematical model in two dimensions is developed. A modified lattice gas cellular automaton (LGCA) is used to model the moving resin droplets and wood chips. Due to the difference in size of the wood and resin particles, some modifications regarding the definition of states, collisions and streaming for the movement of the wood chips are necessary. In the common LGCA a particle is located at a cell of a specific node, whereas in the modified LGCA presented, a wood particle occupies several nodes. Due to the different states (e.g. wood or resin), several collision rules had to be defined. For the streaming, each node of the same wood particle has the same underlying velocity. The simulation is carried out in MATLAB. Finally, first simulation results are presented. Based on the simulation the percentage of glued wood chips is calculated.