NITRA bags two projects from Ministry of Textiles

The project titles are - Designing A Compressed Air Monitoring System to Optimize Energy Consumption in A Textile Mill for the first project and Exploring The Possibility of Replacing Texturized Nylon Filament Yarn With Eco-Friendly High Twist Cellulose Yarns by Doing Slack Mercerization for the second.

Scientists at NITRA have already started working in the above projects. In this particular issue of NITRA e-Bulletin, we apprise you about the first project i.e. project on designing a compressed air monitoring system to optimize energy consumption in a textile mill.

In our forthcoming issue, we would present before you a brief highlight of the other project i.e. project on exploring the possibility of replacing texturized nylon filament yarn with eco-friendly high twist cellulose yarns by doing slack mercerization.

Project I

Title: Designing a compressed air monitoring system to optimize energy consumption in a textile mill

Broad Subject: Engineering

Duration: 18 Months

Abstract From Project Summary

Air compressor accounts for significant amount of electricity used in textile industry. Air compressors are used to supply process requirement, to operate pneumatic tools and equipment, and to meet instrumentation need. Only 10-30% of energy reaches the point of end-use and balance 70-90% of energy of the power of the prime mover being converted to unusable heat energy and other system losses. In a modern mill, compressors account of 8-9% of total power consumption.

Leakages can be a significant source of wasted energy in the compressed air system, sometimes wasting 20-50% of a compressor’s output. A typical textile mill will likely have a leak rate equal to 20% of total compressed air production capacity. In addition to being a source of wasted energy, leaks can also contribute to other operating losses.

Due to unavailability of compressed air flow meters and monitoring system it is very hard to assess the performance of the compressors and leakage losses. It helps in immediate finding out the problems and assessment of the efficiency on daily basis as well. Also the benchmark of the performance for different conditions can also be established and the performance can be improved accordingly.

The centralized compressed air monitoring and data acquisition system for the entire plant. With the help of this system compressed air generation and energy consumption trends and other parameters can be acquired online on single point PC for the entire plant as well as for different load centers.

With the help of this system overall load profile can be regularly monitored and the important parameters like pressure setting can be optimized and compressor modulation can be done for efficient utilization of compressor.

Benchmark can be established in terms of overall production & overall compressed air and electrical power consumption. Apart from above machine wise performance can also be regularly monitored in terms of efficient utilization of compressed air. Most importantly the above system will help to earmark the areas where the loss of compressed is there due to any system deficiency.

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