Drying

The role and efficiency of drying, especially in petfood and aquatic feeds, has received much more scrutiny than ever—especially in light of the co-packers whose customers require a substantial amount of warehousing for market surges and just-in-time delivery. Being able to effectively remove excess moisture from a large tonnage of product in a cost-efficient manner goes a long way in lowering the bottom line and easing the already tight constraints on our environment.

At ETI, we couple basic drying fundamentals with efficiency innovations to help our customers achieve just this goal.

Effectively removing excess moisture from a
large tonnage of product goes a long way in
lowering the bottom line and easing constraints
on our environment.

The building block of our fundamentals starts with a design that allows for balanced airflows and the ability to manage them to suit your product specifications—not the other way around. Thanks to a dual plenum design, sub-floors between the conveyors and other processing enhancements as seen with our Airflow II (AFII), the air flows can be tailored to provide an optimum drying environment for your products.

Further flexibility is provided with the ability to direct heated air flow
from either the top or bottom of the beds, eliminating issues with uneven

drying. And the sanitation conscious design, with fans and heaters located outside the plenum and intuitive access door placement, allows our clients to maintain a level of operation above the average equipment operating efficiency of most production environments.

To further assist our client base in their success, we have also developed a mass energy algorithm that allows our dryers to realize the full potential of their energy input. By managing the energy potential of the exhaust air, coupled with an insightful re-circulation scheme, we are now able to utilize close to 92% of the moisture removing capacity of the heated air.

Bottom line

Even though natural gas, which is the most common fuel type, is one of the cleanest burning fossil fuels, its combustion still produces pollutants that can be minimized with efficient application and operation. In a case study with one of our clients that replaced a non-ETI dryer with an ETI AFII producing a high volume of petfood, the company was able to:

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■ Reduce its natural gas consumption by 25% in a high tonnage

petfood facility;

■ Effectively reducing greenhouse gas contribution by 1.32 million

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■ Save US$45,000 annually on natural gas costs (based on local costs

of natural gas and actual dryer BTU requirements);

■ Sell an additional 2 million lbs. of petfood due to improved moisture management. ■