38 Case Studies
Crouzet comes through
THE COACH-BUILDING GROUP Frappa supports haulage professionals by providing all their refrigerated transport equipment needs. In 2010 the group, through its Cryofridge brand, diversified into indirect nitrogen refrigeration with the Silencio system. The principle: nitrogen circulates in an exchanger and cold is distributed through the insulated space. The benefits: the system is all electric therefore quiet which means that deliveries can be made in urban areas both day and night without disturbing the residents. It is also eco-friendly, unlike more conventional refrigeration systems that use fuel to power the refrigeration unit, which runs with a fan and a heat engine.
Cryofridge uses this technology in its single or multi-temperature trailers and generates both positive refrigeration (keeping food fresh) and negative refrigeration (freezing and deep- freezing).
To manage this system, Cryofridge was until recently using an electronic card developed for the aerospace industry, which was rigid, complicated to use and to programme. The development team was keen to migrate to a more flexible solution, that would be easier to programme and set up. Its impeccable level of support led to Crouzet Automation’s solution being chosen for this project.
It consists of two MTP programmable touch panels, two Millenium 3 Smart logic controllers and accessories from the range. After learning to use the programming workshops (M3 Soft and MTP) in no time, the Cryofridge team was able to program the Millenium 3 logic controllers and MTP panels without a hitch.
“Crouzet Automation’s engineers were on hand from the start of the project to help us define the Silencio management system architecture, and during the tests conducted on it. This meant we were able to build the system in record time: just three months,” said Bernard Valentin, consultant engineer at Cryofridge.
“Programmable touch panels connected directly to the logic controllers were also a factor in our choice of Crouzet Automation to manage this project,” Germain Blauvac, research and development manager at Frappa, added. “They are very easy to use for truck drivers; they control the system directly, whereas we receive precious feedback concerning the history of the controlled parameters.”
ACR News July 2014
ONE OF THE UK’s largest producers of duck products is set to save £30,000 a year on freezing costs following the introduction of ABB variable-speed drives on its blast chiller application. Cherry Valley Farms of Lincolnshire rears some eight million ducks every year and processes 45,000 birds a day. Some are prepared as fresh duck products but most are frozen in the company’s ten blast chiller bays. Each bay has two 4kW motors turning fans that blow air over coils of ammonia to produce a blast of very cold air. A complete day’s production of ducks is usually frozen in around ten hours overnight.
Although freezing only takes place four days a week, the fans need to operate 24 hours a day every day, as switching the fans off would cause them to ice up. As the blast chillers are a major part of the production process and an energy intensive application, Cherry Valley Farms was keen to investigate any methods that would reduce the amount of energy used by the blast chillers.
It was not possible to control the temperature of the blast chillers through PI control as the bays go through regular defrost cycles. There is also a significant air exchange between the bays, making any form of temperature feedback unreliable. The company asked ABB authorised value provider, Inverter Drive Systems (IDS), to come up with a solution. Rob Stevens, factory engineering manager for Cherry Valley Farms, said: “We have worked with IDS on several other projects.
They have installed ABB variable-speed drives on condenser pumps for us in the past and these have worked very well.” IDS installed 20 ABB HVAC drives, two for each blast chiller bay. In production, the drives run the motors at 45Hz, giving a 25% energy saving during the freezing period. Outside production hours, the motors are slowed further to 30Hz, producing a 60%-70% saving when no product is being frozen. Overall, this is expected to produce an annual saving of £30,000 on the energy costs of the blast chillers.
Phil Nightingale of IDS said: “We set up one of the variable-speed drives as the master, with the other 19 as slaves. This allows the operation times of the master drive to be set and all the slave drives will follow this schedule. If Cherry Valley Farms needs to operate the chillers in production outside normal time, an override switch can be used to bring the fans back up to the production speed of 45Hz.” A challenge involved in the installation was that the drives were installed in a roof housing containing the ammonia lines, making for very cold working conditions. However, the ABB drive is rated for a working temperature down to -15°C, so installing the drives in this area is not a problem.
Mr Stevens added: “As well as the energy saving, we expect that the slower start up achievable by the drives could lead to fewer fans breaking up, which we sometimes experienced with the old direct-on-line method used previously.”
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www.acr-news.com Ducking energy bills
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