Industrial Utility Efficiency

Air Compressors

Best Practices 2024 EXPO & Conference Show Report

By Troy Dreier, Senior Editor, and Brooke Jones, Digital Content Editor, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine 

From October 29-31, 2024, professionals who operate, maintain and design industrial compressed air, vacuum, blower, nitrogen generation, process cooling and HVAC systems gathered at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta, GA, for the 6th annual Best Practices 2024 EXPO & Conference. The event featured two tracks of conference presentations and panels.

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Hannover Messe 2023 Show Report

By Roderick M. Smith, Editor, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

The 2023 Hannover Messe was held April 17-21 at the Fairgrounds in Hannover, Germany. I have been visiting this event, since 1992, and it’s great to see old friends, new companies and the latest company and technology developments of firms in the compressed air industry. This article will provide readers with a sampling of compressed air technologies seen. 
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Food Processor Conserves Energy with Compressed Air System Audits

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

A focus on sustainable products and packaging, in combination with a passion for quality, has resulted in considerable growth for the firm. Plans to add production lines at facility #1, in turn, drove the need to address the plant’s faltering compressed air system.
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ABC Compressors Supports Logoplaste Embedded Wall-to-Wall Sustainable Manufacturing

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

Logoplaste, based in Cascais, Portugal, introduced its embedded wall-to-wall manufacturing model to reduce waste and increase efficiency. The model also results in a more economically and environmentally sustainable method of production of rigid plastic packaging since it eliminates the need for a separate secondary packaging plant and the logistics associated with transporting empty bottles. 
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Mattei Rotary Vane Technology Advancing Efficiency and Durability

By Roderick Smith, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine interviewed Mr. Bill Kennedy, Global Marketing Manager, Mattei Compressors. If the electricity costs 8x what you paid to purchase the compressor, and you can reduce that value by 20% or more, the compressor is virtually free as the energy savings provide a return-on-investment that exceeds the purchase price. Now, if you eliminate the need to ever have to overhaul the airend you gain a massive financial and long-term reliability advantage.
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When Three Air Compressors Are Better Than One (or Two)

By Derrick Taylor, PneuTech 

During Dealer Week, they needed enough compressed air to power multiple machines at a time all day long. Keeping simultaneous demos running for all their top machines required airflow of up to 400 cubic feet per minute (CFM). However, outside of Dealer Week, their compressed air demands were quite modest. On a typical day, they only needed 20 CFM to power their dust collection system and pneumatic tools for their dock and warehouse crating areas. 
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Using Heat Improves Compressed Air Production Efficiency by 90+%

By Hannu Heinonen and Olli Kuismanen, Tamturbo

Compressed air production in industrial facilities consumes 10% of electrical power, on average. While this can vary up or down, it is an industrial average, and is very significant in most plants. Do you know how much of your power cost goes to producing compressed air? We’ll come back to this at the end of this article.  
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Atlas Copco Compressors Enables Sustainability-Based Production

By Mike Grennier, Compressed Air Best Practices® Magazine

The U.S. air compressor market has a compressed air installed base of at least 15 million horsepower. Further, it evaluated various air audits across different customer types, sizes and segments and determined U.S. manufacturers stand to save around 13 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) annually in electricity associated with compressed air. That translates to a savings of $1 billion in energy costs per year, which would remove nine million metric tons of CO2 annually. That equates to more annual energy usage of more than 1 million homes in the United States.
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PET Plants Using Boosters for High Pressure Air

By Hank van Ormer, Technical Director, AP Energy

The use of high performance boosters to raise low pressure air (100 psig) to high pressure air (500-600 psig) for blow molders is very power efficient and offers good operating performance and reliability when well applied. 
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DOE Better Plants Partners Get Serious About Compressed Air Systems

By Robert Lung, BGS, with contributions from: Ed Willhite, Schneider Electric; Stephen Tankersley, Ring Containers; Marco Gonzalez, Waupaca Foundry; and Darwin Jaeger, Plastics Engineering Company.

Compressed air is used in all the company’s plants and is often the single largest energy end use within them. As a result, compressed air energy-saving measures are often replicable across the company and offer significant positive impacts. One area of focus is with compressed air leaks since they are “the best low hanging fruit to focus on and they always keep popping up and waste energy”.
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Cartiera Confalone Tissue Paper Line Cuts the Cost of Compressed Air

By Ilari Pakkala, Area Sales Manager, Sulzer

The pulp and paper industry depends on reliable sources of energy, water and compressed air; maintaining cost-effective supplies of these utilities is important to every successful business. Within paper making processes, a clean, oil-free air supply is essential for the reliable operation of pneumatic equipment and a high-quality end product. For one manufacturer in Italy, the selection of an oil-free turbocompressor enabled both operational and maintenance costs to be reduced.
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