In-Plant Training: Compressed Air Assessment Basics – March 3, 2015 – Frank Moskowitz (Draw Professional Services)
Paul Lemar
Ok, so hello everyone! My name is Paul Lemar and I am the Technical Account Manager and I work for Darigold on behalf of the Department of Energy for the Better Plants Program. And Darigold was fortunate enough to submit an application for an In-Plant Training and they were awarded that event and that’s going to happen in March, later in March, this month, on the 24th through the 26th at the Sunnyside Facility. And it’s going to focus on Compressed Air. In just a minute, we have our expert, Frank Moskowitz, is going to go through some information on the In-Plant, as well as some best practices and use of the AirMaster tool. Just a bit of background on Frank: we’re very fortunate to have him. He’s extremely qualified in this area and comes highly recommended. He’s got over 30 years of experience in plant engineering. He’s got a degree in mechanical engineering, as well as training in refrigeration, electrical and plumbing trade, and for the last 25 years, he’s been an associate at Draw Professional Services, primarily in auditing, consulting, and systems design. And his specialty is really in compressed air and vacuum systems. And he is an instructor for the compressed air challenge, as well as an AirMaster+ instructor and a DOE expert on compressed air systems. So with that, I’d like to go ahead and turn it over to Frank and he can get it started here…Frank.
> Frank Moskowitz
Okay, thanks a lot Paul. If anyone has any questions, I guess you would just chat it in and if it’s important enough, either Vestal or Paul, just interrupt me and let me know. Other than that, I guess we’ll just wait till the end for the Q&A. So let’s get started here. I have slides that are going to go over various aspects of this In-Plant
[Next Slide]
Basically we start off with what is an In-Plant Training? And I can read it, you can read it. It’s system-specific workshops, and as Paul mentioned, there’s various experts. We train, we help you identify, and the mail thing is to implement, anything to do with energy-saving projects. So Partners host an on-site 3-day, sometimes it was 4, some companies actually went to a 4th day, but this is a 3-day, and you invite others to attend. From the attendee list, I know there are a lot of folks from other cities besides the Sunnyside plant, so that’s coming in. The mention of workshops that have other energy uses, it could be compressed air. It could be fans, motor driven systems, steam, process heating, pumps. So Darigold chose compressed air, which is good because it brings me here and I think that compressed air has the most opportunity for energy savings in any plant, so this is a good move forward.
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The expertise [sound cuts off momentarily] it helps companies overcome common barriers. So what’s a common barrier? Basically, it’s lack of technical expertise at the plant right now and insufficient senior management buy in. [Significant background noise] There we go. So what’s important in the paragraph up here, it’s not a hit on management that they don’t really want to implement, no one has the expertise. No one has the expertise to figure this out. That’s why we do this. We give you the expertise to figure it out. [Significant background noise] Let me just say to anyone on the phone; please mute your phones so the background noise is minimal. Thank you.
> Vestal Tutterow
Hey Frank?
> Frank
Yeah
> Vestal
This is Vestal. I made you the host. For some reason, I should have muted everyone before I passed the controls to you, but if can just pick any user at random, and right click, you can mute everyone. And then you can unclick yourself to unmute you.
> Frank
Vestal, did you hear me a second ago?
> Vestal
We did not.
> Frank
Alright well it doesn’t give me an option to unmute me personally. It looks like it muted everyone and when I clicked on my name, only unmute all is available.
> Vestal
Right now you sound pretty good.
> Frank
Alright let’s go forward again.
> Vestal
Yeah thank you Frank.
> Frank
No problem, no problem. Okay so as I was mentioning, the problem that most folks have is the lack of expertise. It says here insufficient senior management buy in and that kind of sounds like a dig. It’s not. It’s just that senior management is pretty busy, if you know that. And the energy-saving opportunities, there’s not enough expertise in most plants to explain why they should move forward, why the return on investment is so amazing and how it’s actually profitable. So we do take a look at the entire facility and the compressor end in this case and other folks from other facilities get to share it and they get to understand what’s going on in this plant. They take it back and they can replicate it in their own plants. And it just works out really well. Every plant we’ve done, it’s just amazing.
[Next Slide]
As a matter of fact, this is going back to 2011; DOE has conducted 40 In-Plants, 765 participants, and close to 2.7, I mean this is a huge number, trillion BTUs in annual energy savings and more than 14 million in associated, so this program is a success. Compressed air, like I mentioned is one of the easiest.
[Next Slide]
We’ll skip this introduction me since we already had Paul give a nice introduction there.
[Next Slide]
Overview – Compressed Air System Energy Savings. Basically, what we’re going to do is figure out how to plan for this assessment. And this webinar is going to prepare us for that. We’ll talk about baseline measurements. We’ll talk about compressed air energy opportunities. A little bit on the software tool, we have LogTool and we have AirMaster. And at the end of this presentation, we’ll talk about the agenda that will take place over the 2-3 days that we’re on-site. It’s not much time to get things done, so we got to have an agenda and we pretty much try to stick with it.
[Next Slide]
So this slide here, very important. The compressed air challenge, what is basically tells us is, if you look at the pie diagram, it has electricity, a piece of the pie as a slice for equipment, and it has a piece of the pie as a slice for maintenance. And what you can see from it is that the electricity cost is literally ten times more than the equipment price. Now I used to see air compressors a long time ago, I used to sell pumps. And that’s the part that’s really tough if you’re in sales. You get beat up pretty badly on the price. You can talk about energy savings until your blue in the face. No one cares about it. It’s all about the price of the equipment. Yet it really is nothing compared to the total package and year after year what you’re spending. So this is a pretty important component here. And we’re looking at the waste and the waste is going to be, with compressed air, the most amazing thing you’ve seen.
[Next Slide]
Because with a compressor, as if you were buying a light bulb, most of the energy that you pay for goes off as heat. Now this is a pretty cool arrow because it’s got a whole bunch of things happening. I’ve got two components here: I’ve got the bottom portion which is blue, and then it’s got the red going off as heat, and this little bottom slip piece down here, 15%, so the electricity consumed by the compressor to generate compressed air. This is basically the 100 psi systems. This means that whatever dollars you spend on compressing air, 85% of it went off as heat. It’s like, I mentioned a light bulb, why is the incandescent light bulb getting so beat up these days? Because when you turn on a light bulb, 90% of it is heat and only 10% of it is electricity or light rather. So a compressor is actually way better at making heat than it is at making compressed air. But you don’t buy it to make heat. We buy it to make air. So that’s one of the major inefficiencies of thermodynamics. And during this seminar, we’re not changing thermodynamics. But take a look at the green. This is the air delivered into the pipe by the compressed air system. And it doesn’t show it all going to the end. So production gets a piece, it shows inappropriate uses getting a piece, artificial demand getting a piece, and leaks is getting a piece. And we’ll have a look at that and see what those mean. So the efficiency, if you ever hear anyone talk about a compressed air system, that’s only 15% efficient. It’s because of this and that’s what the reference is. So in compressed air challenge…
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We do it in a pie diagram. And we talk to customers about what air actually goes to your production. And this pie diagram says it correctly. And this is what we’ll be working with during the 3 days, is to see how much waste is there, how much of the air you’re paying for goes to production. And this is with any plant running an air compressor to make a product. In this generalization, 50% gets to production, and that’s being very gracious. I do studies on plants and only 30% of its total flow goes to production. Leaks, everybody knows what leaks are. It’s a common component and that varies by plant and maintenance. Inappropriate uses is using air inappropriately and is defined as you’re doing something with compressed air that can be done with something other than compressed air. And then we have artificial demand. Artificial demand is the extra air that moves through the pipe due to running anything at a higher than desired pressure. Anything through an unregulated end-use will use more air. We’ll come back on that. So we have three areas that we will spend time identifying at the plant.
[Next Slide]
Now here’s my wow slide. I use it on every seminar I’ve ever done. It makes folks that aren’t really familiar with compressed air start to understand why this inefficient method of doing work needs to be optimized. So here’s an air motor. Anything, even an air tool or a pneumatic drill or a pneumatic impact ranger can be considered an air motor. For one horsepower of air motor, I will use 7-8 horsepower of electricity if I want to use compressed air. 30 scfm at 90 pounds required, 6-7 brake horsepower, 7-8 electrical power. I have a comparison here: 5 days a week, 2-shift operation, using $.05/kWh, how much will it cost to run this air motor using electricity from this value? Here we have a number. You’re going to use compressed air to turn this shaft to develop 1 horsepower, it will be $1,164. If you purchase an electric motor, in lieu of that, that’s $194. This ratio is forever. Now, we use a nickel/kWh in this reference. If it was $.10/kWh, the numbers would double, but the ratio of inefficiency is always there. So regardless of the amount you pay per kWh, using compressed air to do work is this ratio of inefficiency. This little bar chart, if you want just this little one horsepower worth of work, you have to be prepared to spend nearly 8 horsepower to turn an air compressor to make the air. So knowing that, you really have to think about, why am I using compressed air at my plant? What do I need it for?
[Next Slide]
Can I do it with something other than compressed air? And that is what this is all about.
[Next Slide]
So basically we look at a systems approach which means we don’t just look at the compressor room, we look at the entire system and how each component interacts. We look at block diagrams. We discuss key issues. And then we discuss the assessment costs. Now this is the 1,2,3,4 steps that we’ll be doing during the 3 days in a couple of weeks.
[Next Slide]
Here’s a nice picture taken from EA4 which is the ASNE guidance on compressed air studies. And basically it says here that there are two basic ways to reduce the energy consumption of a compressed air system: produce compressed air more efficiently and consume less compressed air. So here’s my factory, and it has air compressors in it. I produce compressed air. The manufacturing plant uses it. So I have two ways to reduce my energy: either reduce it more efficiently in here or use less of it in here. There are a lot of things that are components of this, but it comprises quite a bit of information. That’s going to be the basis of that. I’m going to try to take people off because of all the noise here.
> Vestal
Frank, if you want, you can make me the host again and I can keep track of that.
> Frank
Okay, if I make you the host, will I lose my…?
>Vestal
No, you’ll still be the presenter.
> Frank
How’s that?
> Vestal
It looks like you’re still the host.
> Webinar Participant
Excuse me, it looks like if everyone would mute their own screen, up on the screen to the right, at the top right, there’s a microphone, if you click on that, then it mutes you individually.
> Vestal
Oh that was it, whoever just hit that.
> Frank
Very good, okay. Yeah, the control panel is not working. My compressors work a lot better than the control panel. Okay, hopefully you can still hear me and nothing wiped us out there.
> Vestal
You’re good.
> Frank
Okay. Very good. This is a great picture because, again, it talks about compressed air, making it more efficiently and using less of it. Really, let’s take a look at how we can do that. There’s really only a couple ways that we can do that.
[Next Slide]
So, with improving how you make compressed air, it’s usually compressor control. I would put in there the proper type of compressor, but not everybody’s willing to give up a few hundred thousand to start buying new compressors. But what they are willing is, are they controlling the compressors that they own? Probably, so that’s how we can generate the air more efficiently. At the back end, at the manufacturing end, are you running at the right pressure and can we reduce some of the air demand? So these components here are the key, really 3 of them. Of course, there are a lot of subcomponents in there.
[Next Slide]
Let’s have a look at them, and I have this little comment here. Compressor manufacturers spend a great deal of money obtaining optimum efficiency in their products. In other words, if you’re on the receiving end of being a…, if you’re lucky enough to have a compressor vendor visit you, you’ll get visited by Ingersoll Rand, Atlas Copco, Sullair, Gardner Denver, Keiser, and Quincy Northwest. There’s a whole handful of them. All of their sales folks will tell you that their compressors are 1 percent or a half of a percent or this percent better than the competitors. Savings are squandered in a poorly designed and managed system. So the following information can increase your productivity while saving energy. It’s the information that we’re going to go over. So yeah, your compressor manufacturer says “Buy my compressor, I’ll give you 1% more air out of it.” Meanwhile, your production is using 60% wasted air flowing out of leaks and flowing to problem areas. So the supply side isn’t where it happens. 70% of the demand is where your energy savings are.
[Next Slide]
Back to the compressor controls… We’re not asking anyone to buy new compressors. We’re asking them to, obviously, control the compressors. Here’s an example. The I beams represent the load and unload of a compressor. Most have a 10 pound control band. And these I beams represent 4 individual compressors. This is a cascade because typically as production’s minimum requirement, theoretically as the pressure goes up, if it goes past number 3’s I beam, number 3 will time out and shut off. If it gets up to number 2… This is a typical system when you have multiple compressors, to keep 1 base load or 2 base load or at the lower settings, they drop away. Problem is as the demand goes away, system pressure will rise and you could literally be running on compressor number 1 and the plant will be running at 105-110 pounds. There’s a lot of artificial demand at that higher pressure. When the demand is higher, the pressure can be running down here at 90. So there’s a lot of variance when you’re dealing with 85 to 110, that’s too big of a chunk and nobody wants to oscillate between that kind of a pressure. So this is a very difficult component when you have multiple compressors and there’s no control scheme telling them where to be, only their own control set points, and these end up fighting.
[Next Slide]
The ultimate, of course, would be automation, some kind of automation and/or sequencing where you take all the compressors and you tell them “Well, I want you to operate at a target of 100 single set point control. And we’ll give a little bit of a float, lower and upper. So the whole plant kind of floats in here, regardless of the demand. And if we can hold 100 psi in this scenario, with only 1 compressor, it shuts the other 3 off. If it needs 2 compressors to run a hundred pounds, it shuts the other 2 off and etc.
[Previous Slide]
So going from this where all 4 could technically be on, I just finished a job at a bad company, where they have 4 modulating air compressors. All 4 were running. The customer believed he needed all 4. My data showed only 2 are required. But all 4 ran and they shared the load.