Objective

Our Technical Specialists carried out a detailed survey at the Icecream plant of one of the largest global FMCG MNCs in Thailand. The plant had two key objectives :

  1. Root cause analysis for a chronic issue being faced in the process area and productivity enhancement
  2. Energy reduction.

Issue

Being an ice-cream plant, there is a huge requirement for process hot water. The plant has many plate heat exchangers used for pasteurisation and process hot water generation in addition to the plate heat exchangers required for CIP. The temperature requirement for the process hot water and CIP ranges from 45 to 85oC. During our detailed assessment we observed stalling of condensate. This problem was resulting in water hammering within the system and plant team was forced to open the steam trap bypasses to evacuate condensate

Root Cause

Due to low temperatures required in the process, the float type steam traps installed on the Plate Heat Exchangers (PHEs) were unable to evacuate condensate due to stall.

Our Solution

The plant installed steam operated pump traps based on our recommendation to ensure condensate evacuation under stall (vaccum condition). This solved the problem of achieving the desired process temperatures without the need to keep the traps bypassed as well as eliminated the issues of water hammering in the PHEs ensuring their uptime.

Benefits

  • Consistent product temperature
  • Removal of condensate from the PHEs
  • No need to open bypass valve
  • Improvement in the equipment uptime
  • Enhanced safety
  • Monetary saving 545,000 THB/Annum (17,000 USD/Annum)