Pepsi Steam Boilers Produce Savings
PHILADELPHIA — PepsiCo’s Pepsi Beverages Company recently installed three energy-efficient, low-pressure steam boilers in its Philadelphia bottling plant, leading to a 27 percent savings on fuel costs and company savings of more than $130,000 last year.
The plant, which outputs 13 million cases of beverages a year, uses steam for clean-in-place sterilization of up to a dozen 10,000-gallon syrup tanks and two fillers for bottle and can lines, as well as for condensation control for those lines.
Company officials said the move was part of PepsiCo’s Performance with Purpose mission to deliver sustainable growth by investing in energy- and cost-efficient solutions.
“We needed a more efficient steam-generating solution that would improve on the 60 percent efficiency we were getting from our two 30-year-old gas-fueled fire-tube boilers,” said Peter Eilskov, maintenance manager of the plant. “As gas prices increased, costs to maintain our 100 and 200 horsepower boilers increased.”
After investigating available options, the company branch selected a multiple installation of three Miura LX(L)-100SG low-pressure steam boilers.
Miura’s boilers are manufactured in Rockmart, Ga. and feature a “once-through” fin-tube design that requires less fuel and generates full steam from a cold start in five minutes or less.
“This modular on-demand steam capability makes Miura boilers particularly well-suited to a multiple installation in which boilers can be selectively turned on or off as needed to best manage changing load conditions, as opposed to idling on stand-by while they consume energy and generate emissions,” Miura officials said.
The new, low-pressure steam boilers are designed to be 80 to 85 percent energy efficient, produce lower plant emissions and remain cost-efficient.
Miura boilers output reduced levels of nitrogen oxides, a major contributor to air pollution, and carbon dioxide by reducing the temperature of the boiler’s flame, which in turn reduces the amount of excited nitrogen atoms available to bond with oxygen to form nitrogen oxides, according to a company statement.
As a result of this, NOx emissions are reduced to around one-quarter of what traditional fire-tube boilers emit and comply with even the most stringent air-quality regulations.
“Our new Miura multiple installation system gets steam instantly up into our lines without a long warm-up wait,” Eilskov said.
Miura uses computer-control technology systems to monitor the multiple boiler components to maintain peak performance, with the data sent to a energy dashboard providing the status and optimization of the boiler operation, available at all times and remotely due to internet connectivity.
Month-by-month operational data is also available through the monitoring system, which can help in the permitting process, and the boilers go on stand-by when not in use.