A new approach for energy optimization in dairy industry
Ali Kaviani, Alireza Aslani, Rahim Zahedi, Hossein Ahmadi, Mohammadreza Malekli
Abstract
Energy carriers as fuel, are one of the essential needs of various industries. The cost of these carriers persuades us to find solutions to prevent waste of energy consumption. Among the various industries, dairy industry is one of the most energy intensive of them. By considering the importance of energy consumption in the dairy sector, in this study first the types of technologies available in the milk drying industry is discussed and then this technology is investigated economically and its disadvantages and advantages are expressed. This paper's main goal is to optimize energy consumption in the process of milk powder production using pinch technology. Therefore, it provides a brief description of pinch technology and after providing data table consist of streams information, the desired cycle (milk spray dryer) is optimized from a technical and economic point of view by Aspen Energy analyzer (AEA). The modeling assumptions and the desired scenario are also given. Finally, four scenarios about how to apply a connection among heat exchangers and discuss about cost of investment for each scenario is presented. The results show that temperature of pinch point, hot utility and cold utility is 85 °C, 25.3 kW and 66.36 kW respectively and MER-3 networking is chosen as the best option in terms of initial cost (81,304.42 $), number of units (7), area (65.27 m2) and final cost (7.28 × 104 $/S) that this amount is close to the target mode but it is not in a good position in terms of the required area, which is a weakness in the desired networking.