Whether to build a small wood pellet plant based on budget or to build a large wood pellet productio

Whether to build a small wood pellet plant based on budget or to build a large wood pellet production line on loan?

It is always fair to say that you invest something at first with a small budget, if you see it make money, then you invest more.This logic is correct, in most cases. But talking about building a pellet plant, things are different.

First of all, you need to understand that, to start a pellet plant as a business, the capacity starts from 1 ton per hour at least.Because making pellets requires a huge mechanical pressure to the pellet machine, this is not feasible for small household pellet mill, as the latter is designed just for small-scale, e.g. several hundreds of kgs. If you force the small pellet mill to work under heavy load, it’ll break very soon.

So, to do cost down is nothing to complain, but not in the key equipment.For other supporting machinery, such as the cooling machine, the packing machine, they are not as necessary as pellet machine, if you want, you can even do packing by hand.The budget of investing a pellet plant is not solely decided by the equipment, it also hugely varies by the feeding material.For example, if the material is sawdust, things like hammer mill, or dryer is not always needed. While if the material is corn straw, you will have to buy the mentioned equipment for material treatment.

wood pellet plant

Wood pellets production process

Wood is a common seen pellet production raw material, which includes timber, logs, chips, shavings or sawdust of pine, acacia, cypress, beech, oak, and so on. Generally if your raw material is softwood, you can pelletize it without adding additive; if your raw material is hardwood, you need to add certain amount of softwood or binder (hardwood is comparatively difficult to pelletize).

Wood pellets production process

The wood pellets production technology goes this way:

1. Raw material crushing: usually wood chips, logs or timber, etc. must be crushed before pelletization. The reason is that these wood raw materials are large pieces and can’t be pelletized directly. This process will need wood chipper and hammer mill.

2. Crushed material sieving: sometimes the raw materials have impurities like stones or metal scraps. These impurities will destroy the pellet mill. So they shall be sieved.

3. Drying: the sawdust usually contain much water. In this case, the dryer is indispensable. For capacity below 1ton/h, air flow dryer is enough. But for large capacity, drum dryer is good help.

4. Wood pellets production: the wood pellet mill also has different capacities. 50-500kg/h, use flat die pellet mill; >500kg/h, use ring die pellet mill or multiple sets of flat die pellet mill.

5. Pellets cooling and sieving: the pellets have high temperature when produced by the pellet mill; as a result, a cooler is needed to cool the pellets. Besides, the counter flow cooler can also sieve the broken pellets or raw material powder to get good quality pellets.

6. Pellet packing: to pack the wood pellets in bags will make them easy to store, transport and sell. They can be packed into small bags and large bags.