PROCESS INTEGRATION, MODELING AND OPTIMIZATION FOR ENERGY SAVING IN A FRESH-CUT SALAD INDUSTRY

摘要

Energy consumption in food industry represents 15% of the global energy consumed in the French industrial sector. The energy cost and the impacts of its use on the environment make it necessary to reduce the consumption of energy of industrial processes. In order to assess accurately the potential of energy recovery of a process, it is necessary to study the characteristics of its streams and to know the different technologies that can be applied. The use of energy recovery technologies is an effective way to achieve significant energy savings. In this paper, the fresh-cut salad manufacturing process which requires lots of cold production has been investigated in an actual factory. Local and global process integration solutions have been investigated based on numerical modeling. As a result, the process integration study highlights potential improvements in the cold production and distribution system and shows the potential recovery of wasted cooling capacity, which enables considerable energy savings.