A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program, the ENERGY STAR® Challenge for Industry, is a global call-to-action for manufacturing sites to reduce energy intensity, or the amount of energy used to make a product, by 10 percent within five years. The Diesel facility reduced its energy intensity by more than 25 percent within two years. The use of Creative Water Solutions’ ProMoss™ in their cooling towers was an important part of that accomplishment and has led Corning International to expand their use of ProMoss™ to other facilities in the U.S. “The products we produce here are the essential components in emission-control systems on diesel trucks, construction, and agricultural vehicles,” Hal Nelson, vice president and general manager, Environmental Technologies, said during his remarks. “And of course, we’ve focused on making these products in a much more energy-efficient way.”
The Diesel facility, Creative Water Solutions, and WaterWise, Inc. designed and conducted a 3 month trial of ProMoss™ with very specific objectives and performance criteria. These criteria included achieving desired or acceptable levels of corrosion, scale formation, microbiology populations, conductivity/pH, corrosion products, water use, energy consumption, maintenance time, and down time. The use of ProMoss™in the cooling tower met or surpassed all “desired” criteria, other than copper corrosion, which was right at the acceptable level. Specifically, ProMoss™use resulted in a 20% increase in cycles of concentration and projected savings of over 200,000 gallons of water. In addition, the LSI improved from “corrosive” to “non-corrosive”, the presence of algae disappeared, calcium hardness decreased by 51%, pH remained below 8.7 without the use of acid, and there was no tower down-time or maintenance issues.
Corning International has established a Global Energy Management (GEM) program to accomplish these goals world-wide and their analysis concluded:
- Use of Sphagnum Moss to treat cooling tower water results in cleaner and more efficient system.
- Eliminate use of chemicals:
- – Biocide/Algaecide
- – Acid/base for pH and alkalinity control
- – Corrosion inhibitors
- Minor reduction in electric power usage.
- Fewer blow-downs = less make-up water.
Savings: Facility water use reduced by ~15%, surpassing GEM reduction goal of 3%.
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