Energy saving with power supply modulation

We have talked many times about heating systems using electrical resistors with power supply modulation in order to achieve significant energy savings. These are in fact the typical mono-fluid thermoregulating units for industrial processes, and in particular we are going back to a plant that Tempco has installed years ago for a customer, aimed at heating a fluid in preparation vessels, in a very short time lapse.

Having preparation vessels with very high volume capacity, the power required was high as well, we’re talking about 150 kW or electrical power for the initial heating phase in order to heat diathermic oil at the temperature or 250° C. But once the fluid is heated, the cycle must be maintained and the installed power is only partially employed, or even no more required.

We then suggested the customer to install the control panel of the electrical resistors with triode thyristors, and thus with modulating power, a kind of inverter, that allows to manage the resistor supplying power based on the actual real need.

After two years of functioning, we visited the customer and downloaded the data from the data logger installed on board of the thermoregulating unit. By speaking with him, we have noticed that the maximum power consumption was happening during the initial heating phases, after which the heating power required for the production process used to go down even at 25% of it.

The idea of the user for the additional new plants we will install next year has been to extend the initial heating time cycles, programming the start of the production plant in advance of a few hours in order to have a lower installed starting power capacity, and therefore drastically reduce the energy consumption.

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