
Reducing Costs and Harmful Emissions with Green Drying
Some rotary dryer manufacturers specialize in green drying by incorporating low energy and ecological features into their designs. Such eco-friendly measures can significantly reduce the operating expenses of processing industry businesses. Using clean steam rather than products of combustion, steam tube dryers are one of the most ecological drying technologies.
Steam tube dryers are indirect-heat dryers utilizing the latent heat from clean low-temperature saturated steam rather than hot gases used in fossil fuel-fired combustion systems. This highly efficient heat-transfer design also makes steam tube dryers one of the most thermally efficient drying technologies.
Pictured Above – Another clean green drying machine, we custom-engineered and built this massive steam tube dryer for processing mass quantities of canola flakes for an oil seeds processor in central Canada.
Higher thermal efficiency means lower fuel consumption and lower operating costs
Many industrial processes now utilize waste heat boilers which are designed to use process waste streams, or biomass, as fuel. What was once a waste stream can now be a low cost environmentally-friendly energy source in a steam tube dryer, which are often used to replace less efficient, higher emission drying processes.
Some steam tube dryer designs use low temperatures which release fewer volatiles from organic compounds than other types of higher temperature, direct heat drying technologies. This eliminates the need for costly thermal oxidizers often required for other drying technologies.
Lower temperature operation also means lower thermal stresses on the equipment and longer intervals between major maintenance requirements. As a premier rotary dryer manufacturer of long-lasting steam tube dryers, some of our steam tube dryers in service today were commissioned over 75 years ago.
Pictured Above – Weighing 610,000 pounds (empty shell weight) and 12’-9” in diameter and 128’ long, our steam tube dryer journeyed to Canada via highways, railways and waterways (as shown here rollin’ on the river).
Louisville Dryer’s steam tube dryers do not use heated air as energy to drive the drying process. Only a very small volume of air is used to carry out the water vapor generated in the drying process of their units. With such a small exhaust volume discharged from their dryers, the size and horsepower requirements of the air handling equipment are normally 80% less than direct-heat dryers. And, in some processes, the small amount of exhaust gas is sent directly to the boiler as combustion air, completely eliminating air emissions.
Turn Waste into Profit
The larger volumes of dryer discharge gas from Louisville Dryer steam tube dryers are used in many industries to convert process waste streams into valuable secondary products.
Pictured Above – Our jumbo steam tube dryer custom built for a Canada-based oils seeds processor made part of its journey north via 18-axle trailer and railway.
Some examples include:
The residual spent grains from the fermentation process in both beverage alcohol and ethanol production are dried in steam tube dryers and sold as high nutrient animal feed.
In the manufacture of soda ash, steam tube dryers are used to convert sodium bicarbonate into sodium carbonate – where CO2 is generated, captured in the dryer, and returned to the process to make more feedstock. Direct heat drying technologies would contaminate the valuable CO2 by-product.
Waste paper sludge which for decades had been sent to landfill is now being dried in Louisville Dryer’s steam tube dryers and returned to the boiler as fuel.
View our extensive list of customer products which our steam tube dryers and our other types of drying systems have heated, dried and processed over the years.
Pictured Above – Louisville Dryer Company steam tube dryers are frequently selected by distilleries and other grain processors across the country.
SECURE YOUR GREEN DRYING SOLUTION
To learn how your company can benefit from the green technologies of a steam tube dryer, watch our video series here and call our applications engineers today at 800-735-3163.