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Compressed Air Measurement Helps Reduce Energy Use

Installing Festo’s E2M energy efficiency modules helped medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers tackle their environmental footprint, not only saving money but using the data to provide predictive maintenance as well.

Festo Life Sciences Plant
Festo

There are all kinds of good reasons to save energy in your production facility. Aside from desires to reduce the environmental footprint of a plant, perhaps receiving a tax rebate in the process, saving energy also saves money. Using compressed air responsibly—through the use of Industry 4.0 technologies—is a good way to get started down that green path.

A typical pneumatics schematic shows how prevalent compressed air is in a life sciences manufacturing environment.A typical pneumatics schematic shows how prevalent compressed air is in a life sciences manufacturing environment.FestoCompressed air is a very common energy source for automation in the life sciences industry—used in particular to activate a wide range of valves and linear actuators in the production of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), solution preparation, solid preparation, packaging automation, and more. It’s a clean source of energy that is readily available, powerful, and simple. It’s also a great place to look if you want to save energy. It takes significant electrical costs to generate compressed air, so managing the use of that compressed air can be instrumental in a plant’s overall energy consumption strategy. And it’s a common place for waste, where leaks often go undetected.

“The reduction of energy is on everybody’s minds,” said Craig Correia, director of life sciences and process industries for Festo. Speaking recently at the virtual Festo Experience trade show along with Frank Latino, Festo’s global product manager for electric automation, Correia was looking to provide practical, tangible examples of how to reduce energy consumption with Industry 4.0 technologies.

Reducing environmental footprint

He took a hard look at compressed air because it’s not uncommon for a plant to be wasting a lot of energy there. “On a system that’s running at 80 psi, if you’ve got a 1/16-inch hole, you will consume about 5 cfm through that leak,” he said. “Analysis has shown that 20% of air consumption is wasted air.”

Festo's E2M energy efficiency module measures both pressure and flow of compressed air.Festo's E2M energy efficiency module measures both pressure and flow of compressed air.FestoTo combat this kind of wasted air in a pharmaceutical plant, Correia espoused the benefits of flow measurement. It’s an area that’s long been ignored, largely because of the inaccessibility of the technology. But measuring pressure without measuring flow in pneumatics, Correia said, is like trying to look at electricity by just measuring voltage and no current. “More than five years ago, flow sensing technology was either too large or too expensive, and people generally ignored it,” he said. “But it is critical. And the technology is at a point today where you can incorporate flow measurement today at a much lower price.”

For one customer—a medical device manufacturer whose largest facility makes products for renal care—the driving goal was toward energy efficiency and the achievement of ISO 50001 energy management standards. Tax benefits totaling about $1 million were an added incentive, as was an internal competition to be the first plant to reach efficiency goals.

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