Potential of Steam Recovery from Excess Steam in Sterilizer at Palm Oil Mill

Abstract

Energy saving is something that being focus deeply either larger or smaller industry in this current era especially steam and electricity. In a crude palm oil mill, tons of fibers and woods are used for burning process as a boiler fuel to generate steam. As steam is good heat transfer medium, it is use for the regular process of heating the product or materials by direct and batch heating to raise the temperature in order to change the characteristic. In typical palm oil mill, every 1000kg of fresh fruits bunches (FFB) required 250kg of steam energy for the sterilization process. It is not surprising that the exhaust lost that release to the atmosphere from the total steam usage is about 70%, which can conclude as energy waste. By referring to this issue, the cost of replace consumable boiler fuel increase tremendously. Besides that, the huge amount of heat release caused the thermal pollution that may have significant effects in the ecological balance and lead to changes in the aquatic fauna and flora. This paper reviews and critically discusses the waste of steam energy and the morphology involved in excess steam from sterilizer. The system that combined with few steps of steam recovery were developed to recovery the low-pressure steam to form the mid-pressure steam that can able to reuse at the process plant. The steam ejector technology is use in this research to recover and reuse the excess steam leading to lower energy consumption and fuel costs. The overall idea is about combining the low-pressure excess steam with high-pressure steam that directly supply from back pressure receiver to form the mid-pressure steam. The Ansys software used as to identify the change of parameter of excess steam and through the software, the percentage of motive steam needed to combine with excess steam finalized. Via recovery and reuse the excess steam from sterilizer, the total energy consumption will be minimized at least 20% which can able to reduce the massive expenses for boiler fuel that benefit the palm oil mill owners.