When a local Biodiesel company looked to grow there were several capacity challenges facing them. One of them being a process cooling system that would condense and reclaim methanol from the evaporation during the vegatable oil recycling process. Thermal Products designed a process cooling system, using a “Power Tower” cooling tower and pump skid from Advantage Engineering, and condensers from API Heat Transfer’s Plate Heat Exchanger and Shell and Tube Exchanger groups.
In general, the collected waste fryer vegetable oil from area commercial kitchens and food process plants is heated and broken down and cleaned with an alcohol base. One of the resulting products is Methanol. Methanol must be relclaimed per the local enviromental agency and cost. The cooling challenge was that both vegetable oil and methanol reach high temperatures of 260F during the process. Once separated the methanol vapor must be condensed back to a liquid, stored and readied for reuse.
What Thermal Products designed and offered was an Advantage Engineering 45 ton evaporative cooling tower to provide a top end of 85F cooling water to an API Heat Transfer Shell and Tube exchanger that was designed to condense the Metanol and Ethanol to an inital 100F. This was achieved by the steady year round 85F water temperature the tower could provide to a pump tank station combination.
The Methanol at 100F still needed to be at a final temperature of 60F. Due to limitation of a cooling tower to provide 85F water during the summer months a “trim”, 15 ton water cooled chiller, from Advantage Engineering, was provided to supply 50F chilled water to the API Heat Transfer plate and frame exchanger to reach the desired Methanol temperature of 60F.
With high energy costs being a real challenge to process plants and their ability to be competitve, Thermal Products designed a hydrid process cooling system to have the majority of the heat load handled by an inexpensive open cooling tower and pump skid system. Thermal Products then designed the “trim” cooling system for summer operation with the use of a small water cooled chiller.
Employing the provided hydrid process cooling system cut not only capital costs for the equipment, but the operation costs are much lower than they would have been if just employing a regrigerant chiller for the entire heat load.
