Heat exchanger company wins Euro1m grant to tackle pig manure problem
28 Sep 2011
Watford, UK — Pig manure is a huge problem across Europe and has been identified as a major environmental issue in Brussels. The large volume of pig manure and its daily use as fertiliser for agriculture is responsible for causing serious environmental problems.
To tackle the issue, HRS Heat Exchangers Ltd has been awarded a grant for a million Euros, by the European Commission-Research Executive Agency (EC-REA), earlier this month. The grant has been generated towards the development of a new evaporation technology and better processes for volume reduction of environmental waste.
The project is being financed by the European Commission-Research Executive Agency (EC-REA), under the 7th program, which provides financial aid to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to carry our R&D activities.
The project is aimed at developing an integrated and cost-effective solution to reduce the volume of pig slurry, minimize the pollutant emissions and process energy consumptions.
Under the terms of the contract, a consortium of SMEs had to be formed, including a University.
HRS took the initiative, and along with the help of Tecnologias Avanzadas Inspiralia (ITAV) formed this conglomerate and submitted the proposal to the EC, which was later, approved and awarded the grant.
ITAV is a non-profit research and technology development group, based in Spain, that supports SMEs, industrialists and inventors, in competitiveness of the product and quality and access to European networks of R&D.
The main technology to be used here is the special version of the Unicus for evaporation applications. Unicus is a scraped surface heat exchanger for high fouling and viscous fluid applications. During evaporation, in case of the Unicus, the scraping action keeps the heat transfer surface clean and maintains heat transfer high.
This allows the Unicus to concentrate to levels where traditional technologies fail. This makes the Unicus the ideal solution for concentration of environmental waste where volume reduction is vital.
“In this project, HRS will take its current scraped surface evaporation technology and develop better ways to optimize the performance of its evaporators and make them more economical, to treat pig manure, so that investment can be reduced”, said Kleijn Arnold, technical manager, HRS Evaporation Systems.
