Heat Recovery



Hormel Foods is a food manufacturing company that operates plants around the United States and the world. It has several long-term goals which include to cut operating costs by 1%, year over year. This aligns well with saving energy via several avenues, including: supply side energy agreements, renewable purchases, optimization of plant processes, recovery of wasted energies at plants. The company wants to champion environmental initiatives to help steward the environment and ensure long term and sustainable operation of its processes.

 

The plant is currently undergoing an expansion which will include the addition of equipment.  One of the pieces of new equipment will be an oil heater.  This oil heater works as a boiler, using natural gas combustion to heat oil in coils and discharging hot gas through a stack.   With the addition of the new oil heater, the plant would like to recover the wasted energy of the discharge gas and use it for one (or multiple) of its heat recovery loops.  The plant currently has 2 existing oil heaters (of the same model as the incoming heater) that can also be used for heat recovery. The students will be analyzing and optimizing heat recovery at the facility.