One of the easiest ways for a business to reduce operating expenses is to increase boiler efficiency. A great place to start lowering your bills is to look at how recently you performed boiler maintenance and how efficient your boiler is.

Before we get to our efficiency tips, we need to understand boiler efficiency.  The majority of heat lost in your boiler is in the stack or boiler water. The goal is to create conditions that generate the smallest possible amount of flue gas at the lowest possible temperature. This results in increased boiler efficiency.

In today’s world of electrical energy, paper mills and box plants still prefer steam to deliver heat energy to their processes. To understand why steam technology remains the most effective process heat source for paper mills, box plants and many other process industries, it’s useful to understand its intrinsic benefits.

Steam Applies Even Heat

Paper mills and corrugated packaging plants use rolls that are internally heated with steam. Maintaining a uniform temperature across the surface of the roll is essential for making quality product. Since steam is a gas, it fills the entire volume of the roll and evenly distributes heat as it condenses.

Steam is used in a wide range of industries. Common applications for steam are, for example, steam heated processes in plants and factories and steam driven turbines in electric power plants, but the uses of steam in industry extend far beyond this.

Here are some typical applications for steam in industry: Heating/Sterilization, Propulsion/Drive, Motive, Atomization, Cleaning, Moisturization and Humidification

In the sections that follow, we will discuss various types of applications for steam, and provide some examples of steam-using equipment to illustrate them.

This article focuses on the trap Safety Factor and Life Cycle Cost (LCC) considerations.

What is the Safety Factor?

The safety factor is a coefficient used when selecting the trap’s required discharge capacity. It helps provide a buffer zone for instances when condensate volume exceeds calculated/predicted values. The estimated condensate load should always be multiplied by the recommended safety factor for trap selection.

(This is a publication on Panels & Furniture Asia)

Until recently, timber drying is generally considered a low-tech business by some working in the area, with the majority of kiln owners make use of kiln drying controllers (and accompanying computer software in some cases) that automate the control of the drying process of the kilns . These embeded controllers work dependently in a distributed manner and don’t really generate the kind and amount of data that are helpful for operation management, quality improvement,  remote monitoring, data reporting or troubleshooting.

In today’s technological landscape whereas technology 4.0 is an emerging trend, the timber drying business may leverage on this trend to become even more efficient.

Waygo JSC, a company based in Vietnam has developed a new technology called Cloud Kiln that allows for centralized kiln controlling & monitoring, drying data archiving and visualization, remote monitoring,  data statistics & reporting via a cloud service and Telegram alarms and notifications.  The domain knowledge upon which Cloud Kiln is developed is majorly provided for by Waygo’s Singaporean partner Tritherm Pte. Ltd., a company that has 25+ years of hands-on experience on timber drying.