Kiln Baffling

[fbushaw]

We have all double track 85' kilns. I am being challenged with coming up with a plan to baffle partial charges so the air flow isn't compromised. Does anyone have any ideas??

[TimothyD]

Hi Francis,
Sorry, I can;t offer any suggestions as this is very much out of my arena.
Hopefully one of our forum experts with experience with this will have something to offer.

B.R.
Tim

[MichaelM]

There is no good way to do this.

If you are just missing a few units, leave the voids in the upper layer on the sides of the tracks away from the baffles.  This way at lease one side of the track is full of lumber and baffled. 

If you had half a charge, maybe you could load one track.  This might lead to uneven drying from side to side.  Maybe the center coils be off for this.  Not sure.  I would be afraid to stack one unit wide on each track because of stability issues.

Maybe you can mix products in a kiln to fill one kiln instead of running two?  Perhaps different products on different tracks.  This might work if you are creative and have the good fortune to have somewhat compatible products.  You might have to finish the charge with one track pulled.

[Craig Jensen]

I'm with Mike, no real good way to do this.

We make sure to fill one track for sure, not 2 short tracks, and then that track at least dries better.

If we have a short stack, we put it on the end and not in the middle.  And then we pull based on the full track, rather than on the short side.  Reduced air flow on the side with less wood usually results in some of it being wet, so sometimes it will have to sit a little longer on the dry side (in our case under a roof) before it can be released to run.
However, we found this resulted in less drying defect than having the volume sit on the green side (out in the sun in our case) and end up too dry when it is dried with fresh cut wood later.

CJ

[GeorgeCulp]

The best answer is to not have a short track, any mixing and matching of lumber sizes will most certainly be better than a short track.
Does this happen often?
If so you can just dry single tracks. I do it all the time and if you have a relatively modern control system don't worry about the reheat coils, the system should compensate.
With a single track load you will have more airflow due to the absence of the added resistance of the other track, drying time will be shorter than normal and quality should be higher.
Don't dry a short track...even if you could baffle it you would get big imbalances.