A Study on Operating Method to Save Energy from the Adsorption Dryer in the Process of Purifying Compressed Air

Optimizing energy usage for maximum efficiency is an essential goal for manufacturing plants in every industrial manufacturing sector. The generation and distribution of purifying compressed air is a large expense incurred in practically all manufacturing processes. Not only is the generation and treatment expensive equipment of compressed air, but frequent maintenance and effective operation is also required. As a plant's compressed air system is often an integral part of the production process, it needs to be reliable, efficient, and easy to be maintain. In this paper, we study to find operating method to save energy from the adsorption dryer in the process of purifying compressed air, which is required for a clean room production site in "A" company. The compressed air passes through a pressure vessel with two "towers" filled with a material such as activated alumina, silica gel, molecular sieve or other desiccant material. This desiccant material attracts the water from the compressed air via adsorption. As the water clings to the desiccant, the desiccant particle becomes saturated. Therefore, Adsorption dryer is an extremely significant facility which removes the moisture in the air $70^{\circ}C$ below the dew point temperature while using a lot of energy. Also, the energy consumption of the adsorption dryer can be varied by various operating conditions (time, pressure, temperature, etc). Therefore, based on existing operating experiments, we have searched operating condition to maximize energy saving by changing operating conditions of the facility. However, due to a short experiment period (from September to October), further research will be focused on considering seasonality.

고순도 압축공기 제조시스템의 흡착식 Dryer에서 에너지절감을 위한 운전방법에 관한 연구