Thermal Cleaning and Air Pollution Control with Heat Recovery for HVAC Equipment Supplier
Project No 2132
The Challenge
A Major HVAC Equipment supplier needed a more efficient way to clean the residual oil present in the HVAC coils combined with Air Pollution control system to destruct solvents evaporated during thermal cleaning process.
The Solution
EPCON designed an integrated system consisted of Processing Oven, featuring with Dual Lane Conveyor system with precision lane adjustment mechanism, unique air distribution nozzles arrangement to offer high and low-pressure air impingement over specific areas of HVAC coil. The combination of higher recirculation rate and turbulence in oven processing chamber offered end user to achieve proper cleaning of parts in shorter time.
The unique design of integrated Oven-Oxidizer system offered high energy efficient solution to end user by using Air Pollution control equipment as heat source to processing Oven. The Recuperative style thermal oxidizer with primary and secondary heat recovery arrangement were utilized to design “Burner-less” Oven configuration by recovering waste heat generated in oxidizer. The Primary Heat exchanger was utilized for preheating oven exhaust air to minimize the energy demand in Thermal Oxidizer system and secondary heat exchanger was utilized to heat ambient air from 70 °F up to 650 °F and supplied to the Oven heating chamber as an alternate heat source.
The Results
The optimized system configuration resulted into energy savings of 5.5 MMBTU per hour which equated to approximately $125,000 per year. This allowed end user to pay off their investment in less than 5 years period, a much higher ROI than anticipated. This patented method of coupling the Heat Processing systems and Air Pollution Control systems, is a prime example of how thermal engineering can create value through efficiency.