Energy Conservation Study Services
Industrial processing plants use a combination of electricity, natural gas, fuel oil, or other energy sources to power their unit operations. Raw materials, energy, and labor are typically a plant’s major expenses. Process Engineering Associates, LLC (PROCESS) can help clients find opportunities to lower overall energy usage by performing an analysis of their process focused on reducing wasted energy and improving/optimizing processes to minimize energy consumption.
Typical project tasks may include:
- Energy assessments utilizing EPA provided tools and guidelines
- Updating or correcting existing and often outdated mass and energy balances for the plant
- Develop simulations of select unit operations to optimize energy usage
- Investigate equipment, line, and valve sizing and fouling issues which may be needlessly wasting energy
- Evaluate various process alternatives that may be more energy efficient than existing configurations
- Evaluate utilizing alternative fuel sources to take advantage of seasonal relative price differences
- Explore the opportunity for electricity cogeneration
- Provide a final report outlining the findings and recommendations.
Our Experience
As a company consisting of high caliber chemical engineers with years of both plant operations and process design experience, we feel PROCESS is uniquely qualified to assist plant clients in uncovering ways to save energy. Often the energy savings analysis centers around those unit operations representing points of energy use. Points of use include equipment such as steam boilers, hot oil heaters, fired process heaters, and thermal oxidizers. Other significant opportunities are often found in the process heat transfer areas such as feed preheat trains, reboilers, intercoolers, reactor heating/cooling, etc. Last but not least, rotating equipment is typically a significant consumer of a plant’s energy with such equipment as pumps, compressors, fans, etc. PROCESS has significant experience in all these areas. The links below will direct you to a number of different projects which illustrate our experience:
Thermal Oxidizers / Incinerators
Tools At Our Disposal
PROCESS makes use of the latest engineering tools and process analysis techniques. We routinely use various process simulation software packages to design processes and analyze process options. In addition to these the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides a number of energy assessment tools and best practices guidelines that PROCESS is capable of using as needed (Steam, Process Heating, Motors/Pumps/Fans, Compressed Air). A number of our engineers at PROCESS are well versed in performing heat transfer ‘pinch analysis’ and detailed heat exchanger evaluation using specialized heat exchanger design software.