2007-10-24 -
Flowmeters and data recorders from ABB Limited are helping Campbell Grocery Products Limited (CGP), now owned by Premier Foods, to identify areas for potential energy savings at its Norfolk site.
Following a site survey by ABB’s Process Flow Technical Manager, Mark Allinson, instruments were installed as part of a site energy monitoring and targeting programme. This forms an integral part of the site wide energy management drive, which is already helping to improve energy efficiency and cut costs.
CGP uses steam at around 6 bar and 120 C to heat hydrostatic cookers, retorts and jacketed pans used in soup production. Previously, the company used a series of primary flowmeters to measure the site’s steam, gas and water consumption. CGP was finding it difficult to use the measurement data to pinpoint the amount of energy being consumed by specific parts of the plant.
CGP has installed six swirl meters to measure the steam mass usage around the site, two magmeters to measure the quantities of boiler feedwater and two SM3000 videographic recorders to log the data collected from the flowmeters.
Improved measurement accuracy
Using ABB’s swirl meters provided two key benefits that set them apart from meters offered by other manufacturers. Firstly, the meters are able to calculate mass flow, which helps to better link water and steam consumption. Additionally, rather than accepting an accuracy of two percent of full scale, which is the best an orifice plate can provide, swirl meters offer an accuracy of better than +/-0.5 percent of actual flow over the entire flow range. Furthermore, their turndown is up to ten times greater than that of an orifice plate.
Secondly, the compact design of the meters enables them to be fitted in almost any location. Needing just three pipe diameters upstream and two pipe diameters downstream after a modulating valve, ABB’s swirl meters were ideal for this particular application, which did not have the straight length of pipe which would otherwise have been required for a conventional vortex or DP flowmeter.
Collecting the data
The information from both the swirl and the magmeters is being fed into ABB’s SM3000 data recorders to monitor how much steam is being used on specific lines, enabling waste to be easily spotted and providing better matching of energy consumption against the steam flow rate.
The recorders allow precise variations in process data to be recorded and displayed as required. They also offer a range of possibilities for presentation, including the ability to stipulate data for specific time periods and create and print graphs and reports. Events can be automatically recorded together with the actual time they occurred, unlike paper chart recorders, which rely on additional details being manually added to the chart by the operator.
A key requirement set by CGP was the ability to feed the information from the SM3000 recorders into its energy management and targeting software system. To accommodate this, ABB created a driver program to export consumption data and enable CGP to use the data from the instruments as it wished. Now the instruments used throughout the plant are connected via an Ethernet system from the SM3000 recorders, which then relays the real-time data and trend information to the CGP system.
Improved energy management
Since installing ABB’s instruments, CGP has already been able to identify ways to better control the steam flow to the cookers. They also saw that general steam demand was higher than expected and are taking steps to reduce this demand and improve efficiency.
Aubrey Wellington, Site Engineer at the CGP Norfolk site says: “The swirl meters and videographic recorders feed data into a software system, which is able to look at the emerging trends. This enables us to accurately chart how much energy is being used, identify wasteful parts of the process and remedy them. Even despite the increasing fuel costs, we have already seen a noticeable reduction in our energy consumption.”
For more information, email moreinstrumentation@gb.abb.com ref. ‘Campbells application’.
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