“ForEnerChips” stands for “Forest Energy Chips”. It can be called FEC further in the article.

ForEnerChips is not a growth model. It’s a tool that aims to simulate the production chain of forest wood chips for energy. It processes resources produced by sylvicultural interventions of forest growth simulations. It simulates all steps to produce wood chips from standing trees, and to deliver these to the heating plant.

It is at first compatible to the FAGACEES simulator, but it is built to be easily made compatible with other simulators.

It doesn't work in the interface mode, but only from scripts.

The simulator extract information on trees cutted in the forest rotation simulation saved as a CAPSIS project from a FEC settling class in the growth and yield simulator (for example “FgFecInitializer.java for FAGACEES was implemented in the lerfob/fagacees directory)

The resource is defined with :

• species,
• plot area,
• number of trees,
• average and maximum diameters)

• location of the biomass from the stand to the plant,
• status of the resource from the standing tree to the dried chips,
• last process performed on it

• biomass and mineralmasses for C, N, S, P and K :
• for the total content
• detailed for 6 compartments in the tree :
  • stem from 0 to 7cm of diameter,
  • Stem >7cm,
  • Branches from 0 to 4cm,
  • Branches from 4 to 7cm ,
  • Branches from >7cm,
  • Leaves.

• accumulated chain consumption,
• previous process consumption.

10 processes are considered at the moment :

• Felling
• Shaping
• Harvesting (aggregation of Felling+Shaping processes to simulate an harvester operation, mostly used on softwoods)
• Bundling
• Forwarding
• Seasonning
• Chipping
• Drying
• Handling
• Transport

At the moment, FEC is not used with the GUI of CAPSIS and no graphical output is available on the platform.

The output is a table containing the resource information (columns) for each step of the simulation (Initial resource as a standing tree on the stand to chips at the heating plant), and for each intervention in the forest rotation simulation fed in ForEnerChips.

This table is processed in any software (Excel, R …) for further observation.

Nicolas Bilot(1,2), Holger Wernsdorfer(1), Meriem Fournier(1), Yann Rogaume(2)
(1) LERFoB, UMR 1092 AgroParisTech INRA, Centre INRA Nancy-Lorraine, 54280 Champenoux
(2) LERMAB ; ENSTIB, 27 rue Philippe Séguin, 88000 EPINAL

The project is developped for the PhD work of Nicolas Bilot (2012-2014). The PhD is funded by the French forest national office (ONF), partner of the project.