Background

Tetra Pak is a premier supplier of processing and packaging solutions for the food industry. Tetra Pak has a progressive environmental policy and constantly seeks to improve on energy performance. Between 2003 and 2005 Tetra Pak improved energy efficiency in their packaging material production by 14%. The future entails intensified efforts to further limit the products' environmental impacts throughout their life cycles.

The plant in Lund, southern Sweden serves as model when it comes to energy optimization. New equipment and methods are evaluated here first and those that prove persistent performance become best practice and applied both in Sweden and internationally.

Challenge

The main purpose for Tetra Pak to equip one of their packaging material machines with an ADF system was to reduce the energy consumption and save the environment. Moreover, Tetra Pak sought to restore redundant power supply in order to enhance machine availability.

Solution

To compensate for unwanted electrical losses on the packaging material machine, a 900 kVA ADF from Comsys was installed. Additional benefits valued by Tetra Pak include:

• Prolonged equipment lifetime
• Stabilized network voltage which results in higher operating efficiency
• Increased transformer capacity
• Reduced risk of downtime

Result

By removing loss creating behaviors like harmonics and reactive power, the ADF reduced the energy consumption by 10.2%. ADF almost halved the apparent power drawn through the transformer. Thereby, enough previously wasted transformer capacity was released to create power supply redundancy. This ensures sustained machine availability.

The great energy saving performance has made Comsys ADF best practice. This makes ADF the preferred energy optimization solution within Tetra Pak.

Key benefits | Packaging line:

• Energy savings: 10.2%
• Payback time: 1.8 years
• Creates power supply redundancy
• Enhanced machine availability
• Improved environmental performance