PMI
At a Glance
Industry
Industrial Goods and Manufacturing
Project Type
Industrial Energy Efficiency
Year
2019
Location
Xiangtan
Summary
Xinke Chen was hired to help PMI improve the energy efficiency of its factories.
Goals
PMI, a global leader in designing, marketing, and manufacturing food and beverage solutions, has a large supply chain presence in China, manufacturing products covering a variety of materials such as plastic, glass, ceramics and stainless steel. PMI exerts its effort in achieving its energy saving goals by looking for scalable solutions from different types of manufacturing so that their supplier factories in China could share and benefit from the best practices. It is PMI’s third year collaborating with EDF Climate Corps program and this time the company enlisted Xinke Chen to tackle the challenges in ceramic product manufacturing. Chen was tasked to not only identify energy-saving opportunities for one factory where he was based this summer, but also propose layout and logistics planning plans for the factory's new workshop in order to save energy proactively.
Solutions
in Hunan province for ceramic product manufacturing. He identified multiple solutions that can be implemented not only in these two factories, but also in the others across the country with the same type of manufacturing. Chen designed his solutions based on two considerations: they should be implementable with short-term payback returns and without disruption of the continuous productions in the factories. His integrative solutions cover multiple key systems of production, such as recovering and reusing the heat waste, enhancing maintenance practice on cooling and air-compressing systems, and adding insulations to reduce heat losses. For the new workshop planning, Chen identified opportunities in optimizing the facility layout so that the logistic efficiency could be improved which could also lead to energy saving from transportation, production efficiency and production quality.
Potential Impact
Chen’s solutions have the potential to save this factory around 431,256 kWh of electricity and 325,184 cubic meters of natural gas every year, with saving around $136,740 in energy cost and avoiding 6,233 metric tons of CO2 emissions every year as well.