Industrial Utility Efficiency
Hitachi Astemo’s efficiency gains will turn into significant cost savings. In this article we outline the savings reported by the client since the changeover was complete. It shows a sizeable reduction in energy costs, air compressor energy costs and maintenance costs to the tune of 21.95%, 24.14% and 24.14%, respectively. Total operating costs to date have dropped from \$1,277,394 to \$941,959 with the new system a decrease of 26.25%.
When a system has the right combination of VFD and base-load air compressors, how do you coordinate their control? What tells the air compressors to run and load, to have just enough (or no) base-load air compressors and a VFD running, all the time air is needed? Appropriate master controls are needed. These controls are often called “sequencers” or “master control systems”.
A newly constructed ethanol plant experienced control gap issues shortly after comissioning. This article discusses the cause of the issue and how the problem was solved.
A large pharmaceutical company needed huge flow rates of 30 psig air to aerate multiple fermentation processes which create food-grade materials. Flow could vary from about 12,000 scfm to 35,000 scfm. There were a variety of batch processes, mostly running independently. An hour-by-hour schedule for anticipated air flow is developed every afternoon for the next day. Based on that schedule, the boiler operators run the air compressors that can handle the load range for the whole day. In reality, the peak flow can be higher than anticipated.
Quite often the typical variability in compressed air flow demand does not proportionately translate into power reductions at the air compressors. This can be a result of numerous problems with the compressed air supply system. It is important to understand the supply-side’s ability to respond to the demand-side of the compressed air system. If the air compressors, on the supply-side, are not able to translate flow reductions into energy savings, implementation of demand reduction projects should be re-evaluated.
Optimal compressed air system performance, defined by efficiency, reliability and air quality, has now become the main goal when operating, installing, purchasing or designing compressed air products. Whether you are the air compressor manufacturer, distributor or end user - everyone in the compressed air industry needs to be aware and work towards these goals.
The objective of this project is to help the building automation industry develop novel products that more cost-effectively identify faults (unwanted conditions) and inefficiencies in the operation of the compressed air plants of industrial facilities. More cost-effective fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) products can come to the building automation marketplace only after that industry makes very significant advances in the state-of-the-art of its FDD software tools from what it currently offers. Those advances require making common practice of rules-based artificial intelligence (AI) methods that the building automation industry has shown little to no familiarity with in its technology so far. This project will utilize, under controlled conditions, the compressed air plant of the NIST campus as a facility for test and development of an embedded rules-based FDD tool based upon NIST expertise.
One of the statements made in the Compressed Air Challenge’s Fundamentals of Compressed Air Systems seminar is that improvements can always be made to every compressed air system, including new ones. The statement definitely applies to a Canadian pork processing facility built a few years ago. This article is based on a compressed air audit performed two years into the life of a brand new plant. The audit found numerous problems and made recommendations that helped reduce plant compressed air operating costs by 60 percent.
Centrifugal compressors are dynamic, and each has a characteristic curve of rising pressure as capacity decreases. Without any control system, the compressor would operate along this natural curve. A centrifugal compressor's flow and pressure are typically controlled by a combination of an inlet control device and an unloading valve (UV).
We are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, or, as it is known in Germany, Industry 4.0. In broad terms, the concept describes manufacturing facilities where all of the machines — including the air compressors, along with their corresponding sensors and air treatment equipment — communicate with each other autonomously, recording performance metrics to a local controller, a wireless network, and an external database. These communicative abilities are enabled by the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), in which intelligent, networked devices link everything back to a main data hub.
The introduction of rotary screw air compressors controlled by variable speed drives (VSDs) is one of the best energy efficiency innovations introduced to the industry in the past few years. This style of compressor control can significantly reduce the energy wasted by compressors running in the unloaded condition. But the type of VSD control offered by various manufacturers can differ, and some of these differences can affect the efficiency of the system. This article discusses some little known tweaks to VSD compressor control, including some using hidden features that can sometimes be implemented to enhance the savings gained by the installation of this type of compressors.
