Vision and Believes by Chris Lybaert
Climate change is all over the news. Horrifying stories and images are shown by environmental activist almost daily. Documentaries shows how Ice caps are melting. Floodings, draught, hurricanes are violently distroying nature and humans life. Our youth, for who life still has to start, is anxious on how their future will be.
It is more than a wake-up call for everybody. All kinds of ideas, initiatives, new laws, tax-incentives are being created and introduced. The ban of certain technologies like the classic light bulbs which need to be replaced by the more energy efficient LED lights. Electric or Hybrid cars are being pushed into the market instead of fossil fuel burning engine driven cars.
In Marine industry, the vessel needs to have more efficient engines and using more clean fuell. Wind mills and Solar energy are subsidized to replace the traditional power plants. One mistake, to my opinion, is the ban on Nuclear Power (which is carbon zero fuel).
As every industry should look into its own challenge and solution to fight climate change, I believe that the Compressed Air industry (manufacturers and users) should take its responsibility. The Compressed Air production, takes around 10% of the world wide electricity production for the industry or 5% of all the electricity produced.
Reducing the energy consumption from Compressed Air production and usage, is what the Compressed Air industry and its users or customers can should and must do. Compressed Air systems today are still not optimized and there is still a lot of waste and energy loss to be reduced.
Although many suppliers of compressors claim to save energy, the reality is far off optimal. The gap between the energy efficiencies claimed and the reality is far off. Energy savings of 30-40% is being claimed with new technologies, such as VSD technology, while in real usage, their efficiency is worse in some cases.
The knowledge on compressors and compressed air auxiliaries is very limited and suppliers are playing with parameters to make it difficult to understand for non-experts. With the complexity used, to justify the deviation of claimed performances compared to real performances, users got lost in the real consumption of their compressed air systems.
My vision, is to simplify the compressed air evaluation in order to able to measure and evaluate the performances of Compressed Air systems. Consider the Compressed Air system as black box and measure during a period of time what goes in as electricity consumption and what comes out as compressed air flow.
All the internal equipment behaviour and parameters are irrelevant for the user and makes life for the user too complicated.
My believes are :
1- All compressors should be Oil-free compressors to reduce waste
2- The energy efficiency should be measured by the users permanently
3- The sustainability of a compressed air installation should be evaluated including disposal of the installation after its lifetime
4- Waste of the compressed air installation should be measured
5- The right choice of compressor type must be based on energy efficiency on full load and partial load
6- Compressor room control is a must
7- Auxiliary (dryers and filters) equipment should in be included in the evaluation
8- Waste heat from the compression should be kept as low as possible
9- Remaining waste heat should be reused when economically viable
10- Usage of compressed air should be reduced (leakage reduction, air consumption minimalisation)
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