Institutional Heat Recovery System Upgrade

Typically steam project contracts are awarded to replace or retrofit existing components, or add capacity to a steam plant. Instead, our institutional client tendered this project by asking how we would improve the plant's energy efficiency, given a $1 million budget.

In a joint venture with Maunder Britnell, we put together a proposal to upgrade the plant's heat recovery system in several ways. We installed a conventional economizer on each of the plant's three 100,000 lb/hr boilers and one 200,000 lb/hr boiler. We also added one condensing economizer that was common to all four boilers. Combined, these measures reduced flue gas temperatures from 600-700 °F down to 110 °F. In addition, we implemented a blowdown heat recovery strategy by adding a flash tank and heat exchanger to recover waste heat from the blowdown water. Finally, we designed a computer program that automatically calculates load and sets each boiler individually at its optimum efficiency.

Together, these upgrades saved our client over $1 million dollars in the first year - a rewarding payback for their investment - and continue to bring in similar savings on an annual basis.

For more details on this project or to discuss how we can upgrade your heat recovery system to provide substantial cost saving for your business, please contact Bacon Engineering today.