Selection of Instrumentation to Monitor Energy Efficiency of a Process Heating System

Abstract

This paper is concerned with developing a method of rational selection of instrumentation that is needed to supply input data to a computer-aided energy monitoring system, and applying this method in the planning of a monitoring system in a sugar factory. The monitoring of energy usage in the sugar factory is based on the estimation of heat balance of the multiple-effect evaporator. The heat balance is calculated using input data from on-line measurements of a number of pressure, temperature and flow values. A prerequisite for reliable energy monitoring is that the errors of estimation of heat flows and other important variables are kept under control. When designing an energy monitoring procedure, the influence of measuring errors of the individual instruments on the resulting uncertainty of calculated variables is studied using “Monte-Carlo” simulation. Drawing conclusions from the simulation results, a configuration of measuring instruments is selected to facilitate high-quality estimation of the heat balance.