Reduction of compressed air wastage is key to effective energy management. But how do we know whether there is money to save, if we do not measure in the first place? Simply observing is clearly not an option here, because loss of air in piping is invisible - unless, of course, you observe a hike in your energy bill. Yet, the extra consumption tends to creep up on us slowly over the years in keeping with the factory plant being used.
DMK leaves nothing to chance in that regard. The German dairy giant, with a turnover in excess of €4 billion, is in no doubt that you need to keep a watchful eye on your compressed air. Every day the high-tech cheese plant utilises some 38.000m³ of compressed air to turn 1.6 million litres of milk into cheese. For clean and hygienic packaging, weekly another 320 kilos of Nitrogen and CO2 are used and monitored - additional, substantial gases used in the daily production.
A fifth of your energy cost
The same could be said for many other businesses which run a factory plant. In their production, many of them use relatively complex compressed air systems, and up to 20% of their overall energy consumption is used in the operation of these systems. The only ones milking it are the energy suppliers.
For many processing plants, it all boils down to disuse of heat, leakages of up to 50%, missing control units not ‘forgetting’ pressure losses in piping until there is a blatant problem.
On working smarter — not just harder
Frauenhofer Institute in Karlsruhe has accurately established that 1.7 million tons of CO2 emissions could be saved annually by the elimination of leakages in compressed air plants. That is just Germany alone. No one truly knows the scale of the problem globally.
Aside from the risk of global heating, the financial reality speaks volumes. The largest competitive edges you can have these days are efficiency gains over your competition. With growth in the European Union having ground to a halt, it is evident that there are no quick wins other than being better, smarter, and faster.
It is all in the nitty-gritty detail
DMK uses CS Instruments as suppliers of their measuring technology to achieve exactly that. Specifically, DMK uses VA420 consumption sensors throughout their grid.
