Senior editor Kevin Higgins covers energy recovery in the November 2012 issue of Food Engineering in an article titled - Green Series: Good to the Last BTU. Tom Poot, business line manager-oil free products at Atlas Copco Compressors was interviewed for the piece. Here is an excerpt from the article:
The Dennis Group has engineered a number of air-to-air heat recovery systems involving compressed air, but efficiency pales in comparison to Atlas Copco’s oil-free and water-cooled rotary screw compressors, Stotler concedes. Heat transfer in water “gives you much more flexibility in where you can use the heat,” points out Tom Poot, business line manager-oil free products, Atlas Copco Compressors Inc., Rock Hill, NC. Waste heat that is not captured in the water can be recovered by an optional desiccant dryer, which requires virtually no power and delivers extremely dry air.
The first installation of the firm’s CarbonZero system occurred in 2010 at Hormel Foods’ Dubuque, IA plant (see “Hormel’s Progressive Processing plant is built for the long haul,” Food Engineering, December 2011). Boiler feed, sanitary cleanup and space heating are among the uses of the hot water. Reduced maintenance of the compressor itself is a fringe benefit.
Poot estimates one-third to one-half of the oil-free compressors Atlas Copco is putting into service have the water-cooled feature, though the ratio is lower in North America than in Europe, where the company is based. “We were doing energy recovery back in the ‘50s,” he boasts, and improvements have been more evolutionary than revolutionary. For example, the temperature of the water delivered by the system is gradually getting hotter, reaching 190°F in some cases. Poot seconds Stotler’s point about quantified savings. “We can calculate the recovered energy, we can measure it, we can prove it,” he says. “A lot of the time, the business case is obvious, and the returns are staggering.”
Read the full article on FoodEngineering.com.
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