Our design and manufacturing ensures new heat exchanger performs at 100%

Established in 1823, Bairds Malt supplies quality malts to many of the world’s leading brewers and distillers.

Kilning is a stage of malting that dries the grain down to 3-6% moisture to arrest the biochemical processes occurring within the grain during germination and to achieve a safe moisture content for storage. This is done by blowing large volumes of hot air through the grain bed to dry the grain. By varying air flow and the temperature profile, malts of different colours can be produced with varying flavour profiles.

The kilning process includes a finned tube heat exchanger, and it was time for a replacement at Baird’s Inverness Maltings to maintain optimum drying performance.

HEG’s engineering team carried out of a full survey to gather the information needed to enable our in-house design team to analyse the data and make a proposal that would achieve optimum performance for the application and its environment.

After assessing it against the latest standards, a completely new unit was manufactured at our plant in Prudhoe.

It was then installed by Heat Exchange Group’s on-site team at Bairds Malt’s Inverness plant with a full regime of testing and checks to ensure the customer’s requirements were exceeded.

Some of the tubes in the existing heat exchanger had been plugged which reduced the amount of heat that could pass through the heat exchanger and transfer into the air which led to a lower air temperature coming in to contact with their product resulting in slower and less effective drying of the grain.

Through thermal imaging it has been determined that the new heat exchanger performs at 100%.

Bairds Malt were so impressed with our specialist teams’ performance that they asked us to design and manufacture a replacement condensing economiser that our on-site team fitted during the company’s scheduled downtime into the flue of the steam boiler, which is used to heat water for another part of the drying process.