Process Equipment Update
Coke goes green
Ian Elliott reveals how electric process control valves are contributing to Coca-Cola Enterprises’ environmental improvements.
E
lectric control valve technology is helping Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) to increase efficiency and reduce energy costs at its Wakefield production plant. CCE has invested over £100 million over the past
five years at the Wakefield, Yorkshire site, which is the largest soft drinks production plant in Europe, as part of a long-term programme that highlights its commitment to local manufacturing and the development of new technologies. Since installing and acting on the information
produced by an energy monitoring system, the company has so far reduced electricity consumption at the plant by 13% since 2009.
Control valve actuator An important part of the plan involves saving the on-going cost of providing and maintaining an instrument air supply for traditional pneumatic control valve actuation. This is being implemented at Wakefield by the introduction of the Rotork control valve actuator (CVA) to perform modulating
and failsafe valve duties. A recent example is on the production line, where the adoption of Rotork CVA technology for a demanding valve duty has considerably reduced the cost of energy consumption with no loss of performance. Previously, electrically actuated valves could
not respond quickly enough to maintain good pressure control in the bottle filling machine. Rotork was confident that the CVA actuator would not only give a similar performance to the existing valve, but would also be cheaper to run.
Proving the theory Andy Reynolds, automation engineer at the Wakefield plant, takes up the story: “To prove this theory, the performance of the existing pneumatic control valve on the main product feed into the filling machine was first monitored and recorded. Using an adaptor made at Rotork’s facility in Leeds, the CVA actuator was then fitted to the same valve and connected to the existing 4-20mA control signal from the PLC.”
lmpressive results Reynolds continues: “After running and monitoring the CVA actuator in a 24/7 operation for one month, the results from the two actuators were then compared. The results clearly show that in production mode the CVA performs equally well, if not better than the pneumatic actuator. However, when in clean in place (CIP) cleaning mode, the performance of the CVA is much better than the pneumatic. This is because the CVA actuator does not overshoot the set point like the pneumatic actuator does when the set point is lower and back pressure in the circuit is higher when in CIP mode.” Reynolds concludes: “As an alternative to pneumatic
control valves the use of the CVA actuator also represented a minimum saving of £857 per annum per valve.” n
For more information ✔ at
www.engineerlive.com/epe
Fig.1. A Rotork engineer demonstrates the improved control valve performance illustrated by the CVA actuator’s data logger.
Ian Elliott is sales manager for Rotork Site Services, based at Rotork UK’s head office in Leeds.
www.rotork.com
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