With energy costs in an upward Death Spiral, everybody’s getting
serious about monitoring their energy use. For many plants, a big part
of this is surveying their ovens and furnaces to identify areas for
improvement.
One of the most basic of these tasks is collecting data on the shell temperatures of heating equipment.
OK, suppose you've done or
looked at all these things and have come to the conclusion they just
don't deliver the efficiency you need. This might not be due to
obsolescence or any fundamental shortcomings in your ovens or furnaces
-- perhaps your product's cost structure simply needs a greater cut in
its energy cost component. What now?
This is the third in a series of steps to get the maximum energy efficiency from your ovens and furnaces. The first two dealt with optimizing scheduling, loading, operation and maintenance. Now it’s time to look at equipment improvements.
In Let's Get Organized, Part 2, combustion expert Dick Bennett explains how to bring your heat processing equipment up to the operating specifications it had when it was first commissioned.
Over the years, I’ve discussed many of the factors affecting energy
consumption and what you can do to improve the situation, but I’ve done
it in sort of a random fashion. I’m going to go through it again, but
this time in an organized, systematic way to give you a framework for
analyzing and improving your process heating operations.
Every industry has its equivalent of those urban myths, and ours is no
exception. And like the stories that circulate over the Internet, some
of them seem to have nine lives, resurfacing time and again to lead
another generation astray.
Choosing to give your heat processing equipment regular maintenance and
tuneups is not a win-lose decision. It’s time we rewrote it to reflect the
real world.
Maybe it's the Fireplace Mentality. Not warm enough? Make the fire
bigger. That's fine for relatively low temperature processes, but when
you get to extremely high temperatures, you need a hotter flame.
Otherwise, you can build a fire big enough to burn the place down, and
the product will still be standing, unchanged, amid the ashes.
