Enjoy the recording of Tamturbo’s webinar held in September, 2020 at the Asset Performance 4.0 Virtual Seminar by our Brecht Vanlee, Area Director West Europe and Asia.
Discover how you can benefit from Tamturbo high-speed turbo compressors that feature better and lasting efficiency coupled with variability of air usage and virtually no need for maintenance.
For those of you who prefer to read the seminar content instead of watching the video, please find below the content transcribed:
Compressors as Efficient and Intelligent Assets
Compressed air is used in several segments in the chemical, electronics, food and beverage, textile, automotive industry, for example. Compressed air can be used as a utility, or as a part of the core process. In most of the cases, air is used as a utility in the plant and naturally the customer has high expectations.
Customer Expectations of Compressed Air Systems
Compressed Air Quality
The air quality requirements are determined by the segment the customer is operating in – today, the quality required is in most cases 100% oil-free air.
Flexibility
Another central requirement is high flexibility, meaning a wide turndown of the compressor and a fast reaction without energy losses at the lowest total cost of ownership.
Reliability of Compressed Air Supply
The compressed air supply needs to be reliable and it needs to have a high availability.
Added Expectations
Additional expectations above these are remote monitoring and a heat recovery possibility, for example.
Regardless of the customer expectations, unfortunately, in practice things can be quite different: there’s no monitoring, maintenance is only done when it’s too late, there’s a limited knowledge as well on specific technologies, and basically the key parameters are not visible. Additionally, the installations can be quite big, and a lot of air is often needed, especially in bigger plants, so there is a very high dependency of this air. The integration of SCADA systems can be very tricky because of closed software and limited availability of data. Therefore, at Tamturbo, we do things differently. We try as much as possible to accommodate these customer needs. Our slogan is Touch-Free, Oil-Free, Care-Free and we try to live up to the customer expectations and go beyond.
The Tamturbo Touch-Free™ Difference
Now, how do we do this? We do this with our Touch-Free™ technology. Our core technology is made on a single model consisting of a permanent magnet motor, two magnetic bearings, and two impellers, or stages on a single shaft. The shaft is then lifted in the air by the magnetic bearings during the operation. Hence, there is no friction, and no energy losses, and of course low maintenance.
Inside our machine we use two such core models. The complete machine is water-cooled, also the VSD drives are water-cooled. Because of this, there’s also the possibility of heat-recovery at a much higher rate than other, traditional technologies. All the components that need cooling are water-cooled, so the heat can be recuperated.
Total cost of ownership and hidden costs
All asset-related variables are presented in best case in three major parts in the compressed air domain: the maintenance/service costs, the investment and the energy costs. However, often maintenance plays a much bigger role than presented here and there’s also the time needed for planning, the guided intervention on site, the correction of settings, a lot of time and money is wasted in this way.
Measuring, Sharing and Utilizing the Compressed Air System Data
What we do different, we measure. We measure everything and we display it as well. All our parameters are open to our customers to follow at the machine or remotely. Because we use a standard PLC as our operating platform, SCADA integration is quite easy. Now your asset is connected to our centralized Tamturbo technical support team. They’re monitoring your assets and warning you if something is bound to go wrong.
Industrial Compressed Air Energy Consumption
Did you know that industrial compressed air consumes about 10% of the global industrial electricity consumption? Because of this, next to older technologies, our innovative technology has the highest class of efficiency, as shown here from a European study on compressed air efficiencies called LOT31.
It’s important because of the 100% of electricity going into the machine, only 15% is going out as compressed air. Of this 15%, 50% is in the form of air and the other 50% is wasted in the form of leaks, artificial demands and inappropriate use. Every plant has certain small leaks. Artificial demand means that as the pressure set point of the installation is for example at 7,5 bar, the machine will actually operate until 7,7 bar, for example, and everything between 7,5 and 7,7 bar is artificial demand. Inappropriate use is for example if you clean your floor with compressed air, of course this is not adding value. Instead use a brush.
From Time-based to Condition-based Maintenance
On the topic of the maintenance, we do condition-based maintenance. We are a gamechanger, in fact, in the industry where traditional compressed air companies go more into the direction of having an hourly based interval, we do it condition-based. Because we monitor everything that happens in our machine, it’s quite easy for us to see what is going on and often components, and even filters, can last longer than indicated. So also, this adds value to our customers. Of course, because of this, we can claim that we have the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry if we compare it to other technologies like, for example, “oil-free” screw technology or oil-lubricated screw technology.
Total Costs of Ownerhip in Comparison
Our investment cost is actually equal to traditional “oil-free”technology, and whereas it is higher compared to oil-injected screw technology, it’s easy to understand that the air quality coming out of the machine is not the same. But as you see here, maintenance is a lot lower because of the magnetic bearings and also the energy, electricity consumption is lower.
Extra advantages of Tamturbo technology include the fact that the efficiency of our machine does not deteriorate. This makes our efficiency continuous unlike other technologies. Because there is deterioration in other technologies, people need to change one of the core, or the two core elements or other components and this of course has a high cost. Because of this if you take the difference in ROI from us to competition, we have savings averaging to 20–30 percent meaning 30 to 40 thousand euros a year. This means that the payback is actually less than a year, which is extremely fast in the industry.
So, as a summary, we do the system control, we see the machine, we see all the parameters, and you can see here that compared to other technologies, we also have a couple of categories we want to compare ourselves on, next to basically the total cost of ownership.
An oil-lubricated screw has a low investment but high service costs, also small energy cost but it needs to be overhauled. Filtration is high because you need to remove the oil. There is a risk to the desiccant, this is not all so easy and because of the oil, there’s high environmental load, meaning that the total cost of ownership is not the lowest in class.
For “oil-free” screw, the investment is high, the service is high, the energy cost is ok, but also here, there is a risk of oil penetration.
In Tamturbo, there is no oil, there’s not a single drop of oil in the machine, the friction isn’t there because of the magnetic bearings, so there’s no real service cost related to changing core components. The investment is in line with traditional technologies, it’s very efficient, the filtration is minimum, the air desiccant doesn’t have a risk because of the oil penetration, meaning that it’s the lowest total cost of ownership that we can offer. No changing of the oil, no environmental load and no air-quality risk. Just Air.
