Tangram Technology Ltd.

In March, we introduced the subject of energy savings through cooling-water management.

In previous articles, we discussed the enormous waste of energy and money that occurs every day in many plants due to inefficient use and generation of compressed air.

A reliable and consistent source of cooling is essential in plastics processing.

Last month, we addressed how to minimize your plant’s usage of costly compressed air.

Last month we introduced the idea that compressed-air usage is one of the first places any manufacturer should look to reduce energy cost.

Compressed air is a convenient and often essential utility, but it is very expensive to produce, and most of the energy used to compress air is turned into heat and then lost to the system and environment.

Few plants are able to accurately divide up their energy consumption by where it occurs, despite the fact that this is relatively easy to do.

In April, we discussed the use of the slope of the curve of process energy consumption versus production volume for internal benchmarking of energy efficiency.

Last month, we discussed how to graph your plant’s “process energy fingerprint.” Now we’ll show you how to make use of that information.

As we discussed in last month’s column, your plant’s “energy fingerprint” is composed of the base load and the process load.

It is commonly thought that energy use in plastics processing is fixed and uncontrollable.