Process Equipment Update
the point of use to the absolute minimum. They also require much less day-to-day management or maintenance and can often run for many months at a time with only the minimum of monitoring. Thermal fluid heating systems score high on longevity as
well. Babcock Wanson is still servicing heaters that are more than 40 years old. You would be hard pushed to say this for much other processing equipment. In fact, it would be difficult to find any equipment, process or otherwise, that can match this level of service. ake a car, for example. Assuming the car runs at an average 30mph and covers 200,000 miles before being scrapped it will operate for about 6000 hours in its total life. A Babcock Wanson thermal fluid heater, on the other hand, will usually run for 20 years - more than 100,000 hours or the equivalent of 3,000,000 miles. Not bad going! In fact, even when the heaters themselves might be at the end of their life, the pipe work system holding the thermal fluid is often as good as new so upgrades are simple and cost effective to implement at any time. Process heating by its very nature will always be a large
Fig. 3. Thermal fluid heating systems provide substantial energy savings and a reduction in overall emissions.
environmental benefits to consider. The nature of the exhaust gas is dependent on the fuel, but in the UK it is mainly natural gas, resulting in generally clean exhausts containing small amounts of CO and NOx. This is the same for any natural gas fired appliance. Discharge water from boiler blow down is also no longer an issue. Although considered as non toxic, the water needs to be cooled before being sent to the drain and is usually quite alkaline so avoiding this procedure altogether is a further environmental benefit.
Lastly, if we are to
cover all environmental considerations, we should look at the amount of equipment used within the process and length of life. With thermal fluid
heating systems, there is considerably less associated equipment required than with steam boilers. There is no need for water treatment systems and no equipment to handle condensate, etc. They are highly compact, so take up less space and can often be installed in the immediate processing area thereby cutting down the amount of energy lost in transmission of the heat to
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energy consumer and its widespread use across manufacturing only goes to exacerbate this. There’s no magic wand to change this situation - if we want to continue manufacturing, we have to continue to apply heat to many of the processes involved. However, what we can do is manage that energy consumption and manage the waste by-product. By reducing the former through the use of energy efficient thermal fluid heaters we also reduce the latter; it is a sensible way to combine sustainability with efficient production and reduced energy costs. ■
Chris Horsley is Managing Director of Babcock Wanson UK Ltd, Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, UK.
www.babcock-wanson.co.uk
Fig. 4. Between 20-50 per cent energy savings can be made with Babcock Wanson’s TPC1000B thermal fluid heating system.
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