Muller Dairy reduces heating costs through energy recovery
Shropshire-based Müller Dairy, part of the Müller International group, has made substantial savings in gas process heating costs by utilizing our compressors. The secret ingredient? Energy recovery technology.
Compressed air for yoghurt and fruit process operations
Compressed air is essential to Muller Dairy’s large scale production operation, where over 600,000 liters of raw milk are processed every day. This is particularly true in the company’s yogurt and fruit process operations, where compressed air is used in supplying air cylinders, filling machine and process valves, as well as providing a sterile air barrier for end products.
Oil-free air compressors for dairy plant
Müller Dairy’s compressed air installation comprises a purpose-built ZR 315 VSD FF oil-free compressor together with two fixed-speed ZR 200’s. The heat recovery capability of the two water-cooled ZR 200’s is based on hot water being recovered.
Working with ammonia compressors and the yogurt and fruit processes, this hot water is used to pre-heat yogurt bases. This eliminates the need to generate steam and does away with the running costs of two gas-fired boilers that used to be incurred in the process.
The new compressors supplement the original Atlas Copco installation, which consists of four ZR 3-58 machines. These older machines are maintained by Müller Dairy as standby compressors and employed on a rotational basis when there is a high production demand for compressed air.
Recovering 90 to 95% of a compressor’s electrical energy
Compressed air users who, like Müller Dairy, integrate the flow of hot water into their plant processes are able to recover 90 to 95% of a compressor’s electrical energy input as hot water.
This is achieved with our ZR series of water-cooled, oil-free, 55-750 kW compressors. Certified by TÜV, they are capable of recovering up to 100% of electrical input energy as hot water under specific design conditions.
Saving costs, saving our environment
With energy consumption representing over 80% of a compressor’s lifecycle cost, across a wide spectrum of manufacturing industries, energy savings in compressed air systems have a significant impact not only towards preserving the environment through the reduction of CO2 emissions but also on the end users’ bottom line.
Over 45% of industrial applications use hot water in their process operations. The highest degree of thermal efficiency is generally obtained when a compressor’s hot water outlet is connected to a continuous heating demand, such as a heating boiler’s return circuit. In the ZR oil-free screw compressor range with energy recovery control, the energy savings potential equates annually to
- 200 to 2500 tons of CO2 or
- £35,000 to £480,000 of electricity, gas or heating oil
Combining energy recovery, quality and safety
Pure, uncontaminated process air is vital to Müller’s production operations. Atlas Copco compressors deliver 100% oil-free air: they have been tested Class Zero and certified by TÜV according to the ISO 8573-1- Class 0 standard.