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As applications for new and innovative products are continually expanding, manufacturing is faced with added environmental regulations, as well as compressed margins to meet demand.
Thus, plants must constantly drive to improve their competitiveness by streamlining operations and reducing costs wherever possible. When industrial processes are designed with energy savings in mind, production, safety and cost efficiencies are all increased to create higher profits and better competitive positioning. Here are five things to consider in order to achieve greater profitability.
1. Focus on the large energy costs:
Use the 80/20 rule; 80% of energy is consumed by 20% of the processes. What is the most costly operation in your manufacturing process? How much energy is consumed? How can that energy be minimized? The greatest energy consumers in manufacturing are the heating and cooling units.
Since transporting and treating water requires energy, saving water saves energy. Additionally, the efficient use of water can also lead to a more reliable water supply and improved water quality.
The numbers represent the BTU values of each unit.
Cooling towers can consume a significant portion of a site’s total water consumption and can also offer the best opportunities for water and energy savings. General objectives in cooling tower energy management include proper management of the recirculation of water. By optimizing the variable process heating load, the tower can be properly sized for proper functioning and eliminate wasting energy.
Other objectives for efficient management of cooling water is to avoid over treating with chemicals and investigating alternate sources of make-up water. Specific areas of focus to meet these objectives include pumping energy, flow, evaporation rates, drift, blow down, basin leaks, water chemistry, and cycles of concentration.
Another major contributor to energy loss is process heating equipment.
There are numerous types of process heating equipment in the plants that can be better managed for energy efficiency. Process heating equipment is defined as an enclosed device using controlled flame whose primary purpose is to transfer heat indirectly to a process material (liquid, gas or solid) or to a heat transfer material (i.e. glycol or a mixture of glycol & water) for use in a process heater.1
2. Review process heating equipment:
The higher the operating temperature, the more costly the fuel/energy will be. What advanced combustion equipment do you use? At what temperatures do they operate? What fuel is used? How can this be optimized?
In many instances, the process heating equipment has several operational variables that must be considered.
- What is the composition of the process stream?
- What temperature or range of temperatures are experienced?
- Are heated products corrosive in nature?
- Are these units subjected to high temperature cycling (i.e. start-up and shut down)?
By understanding these variables, processes can be managed and controlled to optimize properties and right size heating units and/or maximize product throughput.
As an example, an incinerator or Thermal Oxidizer, can operate up to 1200 deg F, with concentrations not exceeding 25% lower flammability limit (LFL), unless a flammable monitoring system is installed that can easily shut down the system at 50% LFL.
3. Investigate the use of flexible gases and solvents:
Using gases and solvents is necessary in many industrial processes. What are the cost implications of burning solvents, SYNGAS and other combustibles versus traditional fuels? What are the safety impacts to the plant?
Waste heat is a major contribution of losses incurred. Significant cost savings can be realized through advanced heat recovery systems. This can be by using technologies to capture low-temperature heat or to cost-effectively capture high-temperature exhaust heat.
Another way to repurpose waste gas is to use it to produce electricity and/or steam within a facility to create added savings.
4. Know your Environmental Regulations:
In many cases, the volatile organic compounds (VOC) abatement control technology is the limiting factor in manufacturing operations. Can the VOCs be reduced, reused, or recycled? What opportunities can you achieve if your VOC abatement equipment is optimized or minimized?
In flares, there are many EPA-regulated opportunities to reuse waste gas to minimize the use of natural assist-gas while allowing for 98%+ destruction efficiency of the waste.
In oxidizers there are opportunities to increase the input load safely to run more product through, while minimizing emissions.
When the process stream that is going into the VOC abatement equipment is variable, proper online measurement and control is needed to eke out the best scenario for production efficiency and emission output.
5. Measure and control:
In order to efficiently manage these processes, it is critical to perform the proper measurements and take the necessary action quickly for real-time process control. Innovative sensor and control technologies that provide accurate measurements of physical properties and data collection are available to enhance these systems and aide in energy reduction. These systems can also capture the data for evaluation and continuous improvement year-on-year.
Elementale Enterprises Inc. offers clients value-added sustainability – and safe – engineering solutions in both industrial and commercial areas to ensure energy reduction. If varying physical components can be measured and precisely controlled within a process, production units do not need to be oversized which will result in substantial savings.
To learn more about Elementale products and services that can support your ESG goals, please feel free to contact us at: www.elementale-ent.com
“If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.” – H. James Harrington
