A The focus has been very strong over
the last decade or two. Certainly
customers realise these days, and it’s
been like this for quite some time, that
air is not free – it costs. And then of
course there are all of the green aspects
associated with that as well. For many
factories, when they analyse their energy
bills, they will realise a big part of it is
compressor use. It’s one of the utilities,
although the only di erence with things
like water and electricity is that you don’t
import it. But certainly it’s a fourth utility.
Q Operations Engineer recently
featured a case study involving
energy audits and upgrades (www.
is.gd/watoko). Are you seeing more
customer demand and enquiries around
AI energy savings and the environment? wouldn’t say that there is more
focus on energy these days; it’s
always been strong, especially around
compressors, because often we
represent 10-20% of total industrial
energy consumption. That is why
when we carry out audits, discuss
improvements and optimisations and
more energy e cient products. It
normally attracts attention because it’s
very tangible.
What we are trying to promote this
year is energy recovery. Compressors
generate a lot of heat in the process of
compressing air and we have systems that
can capture that heat in the shape of hot
water (up to about 90°C).
In Holland, we have a case where a
factory provides hot water to heat up
a swimming pool across the road. We
also have a case in Italy where a school
is heated by the heat from a factory,
which otherwise would all have been
wasted. The challenges are always with
integration, because if it needs to travel
a long distance, you need to invest in
the insulation of the pipes so that the
heat is not lost during transportation. It
requires ingenuity and investment, but the
bene ts are massive.
INTERVIEW
Autumn 2020 www.operationsengineer.org.uk 27
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