Heat recovery from thermal processes and reuse of secondary energy within and across process units allow a more effective use of primary energy. Besides resource conservation, successful solutions consider the investment costs and the available infrastructure too.
Process optimization of this sort cuts operating costs and improves the greenhouse gas performance of the plant.
Vogelbusch ethanol plants achieve exceptional energy efficiency with proprietary systems such as MultiPressure distillation coupled with direct feed to the molecular sieves for dehydration, and a multi-effect evaporation, driven by waste heat.
The evaporator can run on waste heat from distillation or DDGS dryer, while the condensation from the dehydrated alcohol vapor in a molecular sieve can provide the heat for mash preheating. With thermal integration of rectification and dehydration, using latent heat of feed vapors, there is virtually no steam demand for the dehydration unit (illustration).
Further reduction of energy consumption is obtained by returning still wash, condensates and lutter water to the process so as to reuse heat and water.
Vogelbusch takes a variety of approaches to thermal integration. Configurations of our proprietary systems are selected in each particular case, according to
Our advanced techniques save energy throughout the process plant.
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» Energy concepts in evaporation
