Industrial Drying Process: The Overlooked Cost Drain in Your Process Line

• Industrial drying processes operate on a thin line of profitability and can silently suffer from unnoticed cost drains right under your nose.

• These cost drains are often only found by catching symptoms that show up in unexpected ways.    

• Resolving dryer cost creep takes creative troubleshooting and root cause analysis which might extend as far as re-commissioning the system to original specifications. 

Industrial process dryers operate on a thin line of profitability given their resource-intensive nature, and can suffer from unnoticed cost drains that threaten this profitability right under your nose.  Thankfully, industrial drying process cost drains can be found and resolved if you know what to look for.    

Symptoms of an Industrial Drying Process Cost Problem 

First up, let’s examine the main symptoms that indicate your industrial drying process is suffering from hidden cost drains: 

• High energy loads signal that a dryer is performing more work to hit target end-product moisture levels.  Look at direct thermal loads (such as natural gas to the steam boiler or burners, or electricity to heater elements), as well as pumping, conveying, mixing, sifting and airflow equipment loads, too.   

• Extended drying time is another indicator of cost drains. In such cases, energy and operator labor demands may be at normal levels but extend for longer durations that ultimately show up as higher costs per unit of finished product. 

• Poor vapor recovery rates often indicate cost drains in the forms of lost residual product, increased emissions fees or increased finishing effort needed in downstream equipment. 

• Excess cleaning and maintenance is a clear sign that performance is degrading in cost-draining ways – and not just with these extended steps themselves, but in the associated drying operations that caused them. 

• Dryer fires and explosions are serious issues that themselves are quite costly, and typically indicate additional cost-draining issues in multiple surrounding systems that must also be addressed (such as long-running upsets in airflow, thermal, automation and solvent recovery systems).    

• Wastewater treatment spikes show up in wastewater treatment activity or effluent surcharges.  These costs typically result from high product losses and excessive soiled cleaning effluent in the dryer, sending more contaminant load down the drain. 

On top of these symptoms, you might also see declining product quality and functional product performance as significant signs of dryer cost problems.  However, these symptoms are rarely unnoticed given how important they are to the business. 

Restoring the Economics of an Industrial Drying Process

Once you spot the symptoms of cost creep in your drying process, the next step is to trace the symptoms back to their root cause. All the usual suggestions apply here: preventative maintenance, operator retraining and so on. But since we’re discussing unnoticed cost drains, let’s explore several equally inconspicuous troubleshooting paths to bring your dryer back into profitability. 

• Thermal energy source cost: As the fundamental dryer economics phrase goes, “use steam energy where gas is cheap and use mechanical energy where power is cheap.”  A system suffering from silent cost creep might simply be installed in a recently inverted energy market, requiring a hard look at retrofit or replacement. 

• Material specification consistency: As an example, a raw material’s moisture content may drift up beyond a dryer’s process spec but still fall within quality’s conformity spec, leading to higher drying costs.  Look for and resolve specification inconsistencies like this to drive costs back down.    

• Vapor characteristics: Even miniscule changes in process recipes, drying temperatures, mixing action and ingredient profiles can alter vapor properties in costly ways. Such issues can often be fixed by simple adjustments to vapor recovery airflow rate, vacuum pressure, absorption media and filter pulsing. 

• Degraded surface finish: A dryer’s internal surface finish wears under constant abrasion over time, causing costly impacts to product mixing and cleaning effectiveness. Test a dryer’s surface finish with a roughness gauge, and if the roughness exceeds acceptable limits, it’s time to resurface the dryer. 

• Heat transfer integrity: Increasing dryer costs can often be traced back to degrading heat transfer integrity caused by jacket and/or insulation issues. In either case, inspecting a dryer’s heat transfer components using a thermal imaging gun can find hot and cold spots due for repair. 

Using Centerlining to Address Bigger Cost Issues

When single-variable solutions can’t resolve an industrial drying process’s cost issues, it’s time to re-centerline the system. Centerlining is the commissioning practice of configuring and optimizing a system against its baseline design criteria. 

In the face of difficult cost issues, repeating a system’s original centerlining battery will often identify which exact functional areas can’t get back to baseline, shedding light on necessary next steps. If you’d like to learn more about centerlining or the wider topic of cost protection with industrial dryers, contact us here.