Food industry is changing fast, entering in a new digital age. The Industry 4.0 philosophy will increase digital connections between customer, product, process and factory. The collected data should help food companies with the two main issues of these years:
- Cost reduction maintaining product quality
- Reduction of environmental impact, in compliance with the local laws
Steam generation is a fundamental step of food processing because it highly influences the total productivity and efficiency.
One of the best examples in this sense is the tomato processing industry. Processing tomatoes requires a lot of heat: it is requested to peel the fruits, to cook them and to sterilize the canned product. The result is that the fuel’s cost even equals the one of raw materials. Considering the low margins of the industry, whose production campaign is very brief the process needs to be highly automated to assure a high output in a short-time, avoiding any unforeseen difficulty.
Another case are big pasta producers, which put on the market tons of product daily all year long. Their equipments performance should stay at a high level in the long term and despite the heavy usage. In particular, boilers should guarantee important thermal efficiency and low emissions of NOx, also considering future possible tighter limits imposed by law. In this case, an automatic control system is necessary to constantly monitor the operation of the plant, avoiding malfunctions that can lead to damaged outputs and process slowdown.
In general, emission values are fundamental for all the biggest food multinational corporations, that have included environmental policies in their company mission. Therefore, steam should be produced with a very limited footprint and low gas emissions.
The HE SMART steam generator from BONO ENERGIA is the answer for all the food industry needs and it has been already chosen by several manufacturing companies all over the world. It was designed with the specific objectives to save energy, simplify process control and maintain safety of the plant. This high efficiency steam generator guarantees:
- Thermal efficiency up to 98%
- Reduction of NOx emissions
- Reduction up to 13% in fuel consumption
- Reduction up to 40% in electric consumption
- Increased safety
- Easy management of the plant
Thanks to the Optispark automatic control system the plant can be constantly and remotely monitored. Every change in the value is identified, registered and inputs are corrected immediately in order to guarantee the plant’s performance.
Some of the customers that have already been able to verify a real saving on their bills and, possibly, public funding for production efficiency are
- Princes, La Regina del Pomodoro and Giaguaro, all based in Italy, Les Conserves Majoul, N’Gaous Conserves and Dohler Egypt, in North Africa, and Farangalla, in the Middle East, as for tomato and fresh food processing;
- Barilla, world leader in pasta production, that for its Pedrignano (PR) plant chose an earthquake-proof Bono HE SMART boiler;
- Cusmano brothers wineries and Simone Gatto distillation plant in Sicily;
- Cargill, that replaced the old oil heater of Milazzo plant in Sicily with a modern HE SMART steam generator;
- Cristal Union, a cooperative representing about 40% of beet sugar production in France, that chose Bono high efficiency boiler for one of their sugar factory in Alsace.
HE SMART steam generators are not the only ones suitable for the food industry. For some kind of industries, as the beet sugar manufacturing, Bono provides larger boilers. Huge CTD-type water tube boilers are designed for the same uses – production of electricity and heat for sugar processes – but their output capacity car reach 90 t/h with a maximum operating pressure of 75 bars, generating steam at temperatures up to 490°C. Due to their size – up to 6x13x12 m – they should be erected on-site by specialized technicians.
Bono Energia is part of the Cannon Group, whose companies have delivered energy and water treatment technologies to food and beverage processing operators since the first years of their activities, more than 40 years ago. From then, they help their customers to find solutions to the most challenging needs in the field of energy efficiency.
