engleski

Energy audit in industry for demand-side management

Demand-side management can be designed and implemented in two sectors: residential and industrial. In the residential sectors all the customers have a simple load characteristic and can be managed in same way. Some of loads are suitable for the direct load control like the water heaters, air-conditioners and the thermal storage heaters. Since the air conditioning contributes up to 30% of the peak load in a tropical area, the direct load control with cycling can significantly reduce the peak load. Since the load characteristic of the industry demand and equipment is more complex, it requires an energy audit procedure. Energy audit will help to establish energy management. One of the energy saving measures that has become usual in the industry is energy management system applied to control chillers, air compressors, lighting and ventilation. Programmable logical controller (PLC) can manage those systems using control system optimization methods in order to save energy. There are many factories with chiller plants, very often with 2-4 chillers working in parallel. Additionally there are multiple parallel feed pumps, circulating pumps and cooling towers. The another big consumer is an air compressor plant with the multiple compressors working in parallel. Usually, the closing throttle valve on one compressor regulates the airflow, but its motor runs continuously spending energy. Such compressors can be managed by cycling (switching off one of them to save energy). In this paper it will be explained how to perform energy audit on such consumers and how to introduce PLCs to save energy.

energy audit ; energy management ; chiller plant ; compressed air

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