Simulation Based Energy Management Tools For The Food Processing Industry

Energy demand is an increasingly important issue in the field of food manufacturing because of continuously rising energy cost and of the trend to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Thus there is a demand in methods to improve the energy efficiency of food production processes as a whole since the plant-specific optimization of single components is already touching its limits. Hence the present work shows a model based approach to improve the energy efficiency of a food production line that can be obtained just via using structured and standardized process data and applying data analysis methods without the need to replace a single component. Exemplarily for a dairy plant it is shown that an overall energy saving of up to 43 percent can be obtained by the integration of a stratified heat storage tank and process modification methods.In addition, the process simulation tools allow to test different optimization methods as well as to assess conceptual changes in the process heat supply. To illustrate the latter, a case study of heat recuperation within a production process is shown. The tools may be used as a part of an energy management system?