Corporate
Profile

[Company strength]
Our representative director is Takaya Nomura, who accumulated research at Kyoto University’s Wood Research Institute for many years. He established the thermochemical reduction process (TCR method) for stabilizing the shapes and dimensions of wooden materials. Our company mainly designs, manufactures, and sells thermochemical reduction furnaces based on this process. We manufacture the furnaces by both mass production and trial manufacturing. Our businesses include improving materials using in-house treatment systems and improving the acoustic characteristics of materials for musical instruments on consignment, as well as providing technical guidance. Wood combustion gas becomes a source of heat in an oxygen-free reducing environment. The TCR process features quick, uniform heating of wooden materials by making use of the heat conduction, circulation, and radiation functions of wood combustion gas. This technology also softens or fixes wooden material components by the thermochemical reaction between combustion gas and wood components. Serious inward cracking from the surface of lumber has been an age-old issue in the conventional drying technology. We can commercialize wooden materials themselves by greatly suppressing cracking and enabling stable shapes and dimensions. A remarkable feature of this technology is its world-first success in tissue fixation for waste oil palm trunks. It used to be impossible to recycle oil palm waste trunks because the water content is 80% or more.


[Industry]
Other manufacturing industry


[Representative's message]
The trend for using lauan and other wooden materials as raw materials for industrial products has led to stagnation of the wooden material industry in Indonesia and other countries. This has also accelerated the decline of Japan's forestry and lumber material industry, and results in serious issues related to the deterioration of the global environment. The plywood floor of our laboratory building was 36 years old. This floor broke into pieces because of adhesive degradation when we peeled it off, but we found no problems with the joists and sleepers supporting the floor. This illustrates the fact that lumber materials themselves have much longer service lives than industrial products manufactured from wooden materials, such as plywood and laminated veneer lumber (LVL). They are free of risks such as melting of laminated pillars during a fire, which causes a house to collapse easily. The pursuit of convenience wastes global resources by mass production and mass consumption. This also results in environmental destruction. We hope related industries will not take stopgap measures against these issues, but rather make sincere efforts to commercialize wooden materials themselves. We hope J-GoodTech will give us an opportunity to widely popularize the TCR method in the world and solve various issues.


[Intellectual property]
Wooden material drying device (Japanese Patent Registration Nos. 4074478 and 4074479, and Malaysian Patent Registration Nos. MY-135175-A and MY-134240-A); palm lumber and manufacturing method (Japanese Patent Application No. 2004-33088); trademark registration for NSDS (all wooden materials treated by smoking and heating, including bamboo and palm trees).