Market launch of the
Lacero in the US
The Lacero celebrated its big debut to the professional public at the USCC 2024 show. It was the starting gun for the launch of this high-performance horizontal grinder on into the North American market. Viably, Komptech’s North American distribution partner noted “great interest” in the market.
It‘s the morning of February 23rd at the Tomoka Landfill near Daytona Beach. Hundreds of pairs of eyes are fixed on a green Komptech Lacero grinder. The engine revs up to speed, the intake conveyor begins to move, and soon bulky palm tree branches and brush disappear into the maw of the machine. Seconds later, a broad stream of shredded mulch emerges on the discharge conveyor. The industry audience agrees: “The Lacero performs just as well as the machines next to it, despite the fact that they have a couple hundred more horsepower under the hood.”
The occasion is the US Composting Council’s Annual Conference and Tradeshow in Daytona Beach, Florida, where all the organics industry players meet. The machine demonstration is a highlight. Grinders, screens, shredders, compost turners – that is, all the technologies needed for composting and processing biomass – step up to show what they can do. Naturally each brand wants to put its best foot forward in the short time window allotted.
With the ‘Made in Europe’ Lacero now they finally have an alternative.
Ewald Konrad
INTEREST AWAKENED
“The USCC COMPOST Conference Demo Day is the perfect venue to show off new equipment technologies,” says Viably President Brandon Lapsys. “There’s a lot of interest; you can see it in the trade press and from the hundreds of visitors. In fact, many of them are active customers of ours.” Now, it takes a certain amount of courage, or maybe just nerve, to show up with a European product in the homeland of the high-speed grinder. “Naturally, our competitors have lots of experience, and their machines, often boasting over a thousand horsepower and 20 meters in length, have traditionally dominated the market. But Komptech has done its homework. Together with the team at Viably, we visited a lot of customers, listened to them, and from the resulting insights, we developed a tough ‘European style’ mulch grinder,” says Komptech CSO Ewald Konrad, who made a point of attending the USCC show. With a glance towards the loud, smoke-belching horsepower beasts, he adds, “And we found some things we could improve.”
SUCCESSFUL TEST PHASE
Naturally, the Lacero has everything Komptech machines are known for – design, accessibility, user-friendliness, and much more. But the most important thing about this high-speed, horizontal grinder is that it delivers perfect performance in the task it was designed for: commercial mulch production. The Lacero efficiently grinds tree trunks and other woody fractions, like logging residue, sorted woody C&D fractions, clean used wood, and the like, down to small wood chips. There’s a substantial market for this material, and to serve it, grinders need to be able to make wood chips of different sizes.
Before the Lacero made its big-league debut in Florida, it went through extensive rounds of testing. The shakedown phase for the first North American Lacero went over a thousand hours – and with all the different locations, materials and output sizes, it never got boring. “Mission accomplished” is an apt description – the Lacero “made the cut” in every category.
HIGH PERFORMANCE, PERFECT MATERIAL QUALITY
The heart of the machine is the over three-ton downswing drum with duplex blades. It has American roots and is surrounded by innovative technology from the Komptech toolkit. Throughput and efficiency are top-notch, especially when you consider that the Lacero has “only” 812 HP but churns out approximately 300 cubic meters of material per hour, while not needing more than 0.2 to 0.3 liters of diesel per cubic meter to do it. The same goes for the material output quality – fines are minimal, even with smaller screen baskets. Fines are undesirable in mulch production, since mulch is often colored and bagged before use as a covering material in front yards and playgrounds. Too much fines fraction in mulch increases the amount of colorant needed, increases transport weight, leads to faster decay, and also doesn’t provide the necessary cushioning to children’s playgrounds.
A COMPLETE LINE FOR COMMERCIAL MULCH PRODUCTION
To achieve the popular 10-60 mm mulch size, the coarse feedstock is usually grinded twice. The first grind uses a coarse screen basket, followed by the second grind with a screen basket in the 30 to 60 mm hole range. This impacts production costs since energy consumption, wear, and fines output are high. Here, Viably has another ace up its sleeve with the Komptech Multistar star screen. With performance adapted to the Lacero’s output, the 2-fraction Multistar XXL2 and three-fraction Multistar XL3 separate up to 70 percent of the first grind as a finished mulch product. Only the overs fraction goes back around for another grind. This process reduces nearly half of the operating costs compared to the conventional doublegrind method. USCC Demo Day attendees saw firsthand how the process works in practice. A Multistar XL3 was lined up with the Lacero for an impressive demonstration of the benefits of star screening in mulch production.
“A loader scoop holds more than eight cubic meters, but even so, the feed hopper is almost always empty.”
Matthias Gurdulic
“The machine was designed for the North American market,” says Ewald Konrad, “but as the Lacero took shape and our partners saw the prototype in action, we realized that there is a lot of interest elsewhere as well.” He sees potential sales to biomass processors, who need to run through a lot of material in a short time, and who need a robust machine to do it with due to the variable quality of their feedstock. “The big North American grinders are not unknown in Northern and Western Europe. With the ‘Made in Europe’ Lacero now they finally have an alternative.”
TWO ARE BETTER THAN ONE
Change of scenery – now we’re in Germany, near Wiesbaden. A Lacero has been on the job here for a few weeks. In fact, it’s been in constant use, as Knettenbrech & Gurdulic, one of Germany’s leading disposal companies, is quick to emphasize. They were pleasantly surprised by its throughput performance. In fact, even their biggest loader could barely satisfy the machine’s appetite. “A loader scoop holds more than eight cubic meters, but even so, the feed hopper is almost always empty, so the driver works up a sweat keeping up,” says Matthias Gurdulic. “We’ve found that the Lacero can do up to 100 tons an hour, but then we have to use two loaders.” It mostly grinds class AI to AIII used wood. Only the very largest pieces are sorted out by machine; everything else goes straight into the Lacero. Out comes a fuel with a grain under 100 mm that is ideal for the local fluidized bed power plant.
THE FAST TRACK TO SERIES MATURITY
But the first customer Lacero is in the Netherlands, near Eindhoven. Den Ouden is a big company with a lot of experience in compost and biomass, and they have used a Lacero for several thousand hours now. They are an ideal company for testing purposes because they process not only waste wood, but also large quantities of green waste. They are ideal for another reason as well: The team of PON Equipment, Komptech’s sales partner for Benelux, are real experts in high-speed grinders. With their help the issues that only show up in actual use were quickly resolved, and series production could get underway. So now other Laceros are on their way to customers, including one in an all-yellow finish.
This is the online version of the article „We’re ready! Market launch of the Lacero in the US“ from the Komptech magazine Opportunity / Issue No. 3 (2024) ↗
No liability accepted for changes or errors.
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