Minimizing energy losses in steam systems for potato starch production

This paper proposes improvements to the energy management of a steam system used for potato starch production. The system consists of a steam boiler plant (fired with natural gas), and steam and condensate pipelines with a hot air heat exchanger for drying potato starch (the steam consumer). In the existing system, the boiler cooperates with two open tanks that are responsible for energy losses due to secondary evaporation. Therefore, a closed tank system is proposed to eliminate these energy losses. The coefficients of thermal efficiency and the energy losses are compared between the open and closed tank cases. This study shows that the losses of the closed steam system are consistently lower than those of the open system, improving the coefficient of efficiency by about 6%.