ENERGY MANAGEMENT | PRODUCTION
Make your energy work
How well do you manage the energy used in your compounding plant? Mark Holmes looks at what can be done to make improvements
Keeping a close control on energy costs in the compounding plant not only makes economic sense, but also helps hit increasingly important sustainability targets. There are a wide range of measures and tools that can be exploited to ensure that the plastics compounding process is energy efficient and managed effectively. However, the starting point is to understand how the plant is functioning as it stands and then to identify where efficiency improvements need to be made. The first step and perhaps the best way to understand basic energy consumption in the compounding plant is to calculate the Performance Characteristic Line for the site, according to Dr Robin Kent, Managing Director of Tangram Technology, a consulting engineer for energy management in the plastics processing sector. “In most plastics processing facilities, electricity is the main energy source. Electricity use is not, as is
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sometimes thought, fixed and uncontrollable. It is variable and controllable,” he says. “For most sites, electricity use will be directly
related to the production volume in a given time period. It is possible to show this by plotting electricity use against production volume – the processed amount of plastic – in a week or month as a scatter chart and finding the linear best-fit for the data. The equation of the line-of-best fit is the Performance Characteristic Line (PCL) for the site. This gives an insight as to how the site functions and can be used for monitoring and targeting as well as for budgeting purposes. The PCL is the ‘energy fingerprint’ of the facility and varies with every site, providing important information on how it functions,” Kent says. Once energy use in a compounding plant has been assessed there are a number of procedures that can be undertaken to improve energy use. “The
Main image: Use of energy in a compound- ing plant is neither fixed nor uncontrol- lable. There are big savings to be made by those ready to take control
February 2020 | COMPOUNDING WORLD 15
IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK
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