Gardner Denver dryers keep BPI Heanor’s energy costs down

15 February, 2017

The BPI site in Heanor, Derbyshire, takes used polythene bags and recycles them into refuse sacks. It uses large amounts of compressed air in its production process, but this air has to be extremely dry as any water that condenses out under pressure can cause problems with the equipment.

Until recently the Heanor site used 10 separate point-of-use purge driers, each capable of drying between 100-165 cfm at 7 bar(g). However, Aircare engineers carried out a survey and found that they could replace these units with a single CompAir Zero Purge desiccant dryer, which was capable of meeting the site’s requirements all by itself.

Aircare sales engineer, Steve Flint, said: “Due to the age and servicing requirements, all the point of use driers required media desiccant service and, the inline filtration elements required upgrading. Replacing them with a new, highly reliable machine reduced BPI’s maintenance costs considerably.

“The CompAir dryer is also much more efficient, and as the site – and its dryers – operate for 24 hours a day, 360 days a year, even a small increase in reliability and efficiency can make a real, positive impact on costs.”

Short payback period

Steve estimates that the project is likely to have a payback period of only one year. The new dryer was even sized so that it can accommodate extra capacity if BPI chooses to expand the site in the future.

Andrew Terry, BPI Heanor engineering manager, commented: “Our packaging machines require extremely dry air, so we need to treat this air using a highly reliable desiccant system. We used to use 10 separate point-of-use dryers, but now we have one central machine that means that all the air is dried properly throughout the site. It makes for a big increase in terms of reliability.”

The dryer was installed in October 2015 and has reportedly been running successfully ever since. “Everything arrived on time and did exactly what it was meant to,” added Terry. “It was pretty much a perfect project.”

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