Green’s dishes up superheater solution for food company

One of the UK’s largest food producers is committed to running a sustainable business which includes ensuring it consumes resources responsibly. This ethos cuts across all aspects of its business including the operation of the boilers which produce high pressure steam that drives turbo-alternators which generate the electricity required to power its factories.

When the company decided to convert the boiler at their plant from heavy oil to natural gas they commissioned Green’s. We conducted a thorough review of their boiler and associated equipment that assessed how this change would affect factors including temperature, operating pressure and other criteria. Our findings identified what changes would be needed to ensure that its performance met the company’s demands and were used to develop a tender process which asked specialist suppliers to propose how they would design and deliver solutions to meet these demands.

Green’s managing director Matthew Crewe says: “The company assessed potential suppliers’ technical knowledge, people’s competence and, of course, price. We were delighted when they decided that Green’s would be the best partner for this project.”

Using a combination of proprietary in-house tools and industry standard software, Green’s design engineering team modelled flows, temperatures and pressures. This identified that using natural gas to fuel its boiler combustion would result in metal temperatures within its superheater being elevated to above its metallurgical limit, which would result in premature failure of the boiler.

They then went on to look at how the superheater’s design could be modified to ensure this did not occur and devised a solution that included fewer tubes so that the heat generated in the superheater arcade was reduced. The new tubes were manufactured and manipulated in Green’s factory and the new system is currently being installed so that it will be operational in time for the company’s busiest production time.