Fundamental Selection benefits for utility instrumentation
How instrumentation can improve efficiency and reduce costs in utility services
Process plants typically need five key utility services for their core processes – steam, compressed air, heating, cooling, and industrial gases. Their efficiency and performance can be improved with data from suitable flow, temperature, pressure, level and analytical instruments. Sometimes these must be sophisticated, but often, more basic, easily-used, lower-cost products will suffice. Either way, Endress+Hauser offers many instrument types to meet all applications and requirements.
Benefits
Steam is often used on a large scale, with energy content approximately 500 times that of hot water. Continuous steam heat quantity monitoring, accurate enough to spot individual losses, can optimize energy efficiency.
Compressed air generation loses up to 95% energy as waste heat, while up to 30% of a generator’s air output is lost to leakage. However, these figures can be mitigated by up to 10% with appropriate measurements.
Boilers and furnaces with inefficient combustion, incorrect operation and poor maintenance typically exhibit high energy losses, as do other parts of the heating circuit. Suitable instrumentation can cut energy consumption by up to 55%.
Cooling consumes 10% more energy that heating. An ISO 50001 energy management system can help identify a cooling system’s ideal operating point. This can be supported by multiple instrument types capturing numerous EnPI energy performance indicators.
The process industry uses industrial gases in vast quantities, so energy efficiency is essential. This can be achieved if total consumption measurement is complemented by flow, temperature, and pressure instrumentation.
Benefits of Endress+Hauser Fundamental and other instruments
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Steam is used in many different processes. It is most commonly used to transfer heat. Cleaning and cooling are only two of the many applications for compressed air. The most common industrial gases are oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, helium, hydrogen, argon and acetylene. Products, processes and equipment may all need cooling. Heating processes require a lot of energy and therefore have a huge potential for optimization. 
