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Control system cuts energy costs for furnaces

An Eurotherm product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Aug 9, 2006

Furnace energy optimisation package is appropriate for batch processes within foundries, forges, billet and ingot manufacturing plants.

Manufacturers of metallurgical products are continually seeking new methods of reducing energy usage due to the increasing cost of energy and growing industry legislation to conserve valuable resources.

The latest control technology developed by Eurotherm specifically addresses this need.

Customer installations at foundries are demonstrating annual energy savings of up to 9%, resulting in a payback of 18 months or less.

Additionally, the process time required is shown to be greatly reduced, resulting in improved productivity of up to 20%.

This latest innovation, known as the Eurotherm Furnace Energy Optimisation solution is appropriate for batch processes within foundries, forges, billet and ingot manufacturing plants.

The technology is based around an independently validated algorithm within Eurotherm's LIN control environment, which calculates the derivative of the power required to heat the furnace.

When this derivative is zero, a "steady state" has been reached where power input is equal to furnaces losses and no further energy is being absorbed by the load.

This demonstrates that temperature uniformity has been reached for an entire load, both at the centre and within all of the homogeneous piece parts.

This ability to pinpoint the exact moment when the centre of the load and the piece parts reach the required temperature allows the cycle time, regardless of load, to be optimised.

Traditionally, methods of ensuring a stable and homogeneous load temperature have depended either on manual intervention or standard automatic control.

Manual intervention has the dual disadvantages that it is dependent on accurate interpretation by the operator, and interrupts the furnace operation, slowing the overall process.

Using the standard automatic control solution, the dwell temperature heating process parameters need to be over-specified to allow for a margin of variance and ensure that the piece part temperature is uniform.

This inevitably leads to energy wastage.

Successful references of Eurotherm's Furnace Energy Optimisation solution with existing customers, including one of Europe's largest energy suppliers, continue to show dramatic savings and it is likely that this application will be widely adopted to demonstrate a commitment to energy saving.

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