In the following film from the plant manufacturer GEA, you will get an insight into how engineers make a production plant climate-neutral by looking at where a lot of energy is consumed and choosing better solutions. When you prepare a smoothie in a class activity or at home, you might not give much thought to the power of your blender, and you don’t need to heat the smoothie to make it last. However, in a smoothie factory, things look a bit different. Would you be interested in contributing to such projects?
In this English-language film, Robert Unsworth, GEA refrigeration and heating expert, and Franz-Josef Helms, GEA process expert, discuss the path to making the production plant climate-neutral and then show in two animated clips what a traditional production plant looks like and what they have changed about it. You can also just watch the animated clips. They start at 0:43 and 1:23.
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During the first tour of the production plant, it is still equipped as usual:
It is quite warm inside because a lot of heat is generated by the motors, pumps, lighting, people, and during fruit processing. Both a boiler and a cooling system are needed for juice production. A lot of energy is wasted and released into the environment. In addition, a lot of hot water is needed because after each production batch, the pipes and heat exchangers are rinsed and cleaned before the next batch can be produced.
During the second tour of the production plant, everything is different:
- The burner and natural gas are replaced by a heat pump.
- Fossil fuels are no longer needed; instead, regeneratively generated electricity is used [which is generated on-site by solar collectors and large wind turbines north and south of the premises].
- Wastewater from the rinsing processes is saved by cleaning the pipes with an air tornado instead of water.
- In the pasteurizer, which makes smoothies last longer by heating them, the temperature is adjusted first: The pasteurization temperature can be lowered from 95 to 90 degrees Celsius without affecting shelf life. The lower temperature allows heat pumps to be used, which require significantly less energy than the steam used previously, as they draw part of their energy from waste heat from other processes.
The approach can be summarized as follows:
- Consume less energy
- Reuse energy
- Upcycling of energy
- Homemade green electricity
- Save water with lemons and other details
If you are interested in this in more detail, read here: https://www.gea.com/de/customer-cases/one-small-step-one-giant-contribution/