Steam for Salami Production
When a steam boiler is suitable for the complexities of the business.
The Client
Salami Producer
The customer is a Lombardy-based company that specializes in the production of hams and mortadella.
As for many of our other customers, it’s a niche company that’s highly devoted to the quality of its cured meats.
The complexity of their system, which reflects the wide range of products sold, required flexibility, and for this reason we turned to the Ecovapor model.
Do you want to improve your production lines’ performance?
The Problem
Low level of automation
In recent years, the demand for cured meats, and therefore the production of the same, has increased considerably.
But this positive market trend led to a serious problem: there was no longer enough steam available to meet the production lines’ needs.
The company’s team of engineers thus realized that they needed to install a new steam boiler in order to satisfy the production requirements.
The new boiler, therefore, had to be quickly installed alongside the old one, without interrupting the production processes.
Moreover, the new boiler also had to be calibrated based on the daily requirements of the company’s production lines.
Finally, the company noted that the new boiler needed to be extremely reliable, as a positive steam temperature gradient had to always be maintained in order to avoid compromising the final product.
These were the requirements that the company presented to ICI.
We, therefore, analyzed their production processes and determined their daily pressure and steam flow rate profiles.
During the analysis of their production line, major inefficiencies were encountered in the management of the various ovens.
In fact, every time an oven needed to be used, the supervisor had to manually verify the steam availability before starting the oven.
The engineers in charge of production even had to recover the heat from the plant room’s flue gas to pre-heat the water needed for the washing operations and for other treatments carried out outside the heating plant room.
The new economizer, therefore, had to be developed in an ad-hoc fashion, in order to allow for a parallel connection to an outside circuit.
The Solution
Production, automation and reliability.
“Smart” management of the hourly and daily steam requirements. Increased automation for turning on the ovens. Stable and reliable steam production. Flue gas heat recovery. Quick and easy installation.
Among the various solutions available, the Ecovapor was the only one flexible enough to meet all the customer’s requirements.
The Ecovapor model provides for reduced installation times and greatly decreases the number of technicians required. Thanks to its sensors, it’s able to maintain the requested temperature gradients constant, in order to ensure the quality of the final product.
But, above all, the Ecovapor model’s ease of customization was able to be exploited in order to handle all the complexities of the company’s production lines.
In this manner, it was able to be adapted to meet the production lines’ requirements, in order to manage the ovens’ sequences and pre-heat the technological fluids.
In fact, the economizer was modified in order to allow for the necessary wash water to be pre-heated, along with the boiler’s supply water.
In addition to the economizer, an oven control system, known as the CMMS, was also installed in order to automatically determine which ovens to turn on or off based on the steam availability.
The Results
Increased automation, decreased consumption
As soon as the system was installed, the production cycle’s performance levels improved considerably, with a consequent reduction in costs.
The Ecovapor unit immediately began managing the ovens’ steam requirements on its own.
By continuously monitoring the amount of steam dispensed and the incoming requests, the innovative CMMS system determines whether a new oven can be turned on.
With the Ecovapor unit installed, the technician who was previously required to oversee the activation of the ovens can once again dedicate himself entirely to the production process.
What’s more, the automated management of the daily steam requirements, including that of the ovens, will provide for considerable savings in terms of annual natural gas consumption.
Contact Us
Give a boost to your company
We know that continuous innovation can be complicated.
Contact us to find out how Ecovapor can improve your steam production system.
