Members Spotlight: SPX FLOW

Members Spotlight: How SPX FLOW's SteamRecycle™ technology helps a Danish plant-based beverage producer cut cooling water circulation by up to 31-33 m³ an hour.

At Grønvang Food in Denmark, every hour of UHT processing carried a hidden water cost. The plant's infusion line produced large volumes of excess steam, and condensing it kept tens of cubic metres of cooling water in constant circulation. The heat leaving the process as vapour never came back.

Grønvang Food turned to SPX FLOW, an FMTE member, and installed SteamRecycle™ on its 12,000 litre per hour UHT infusion line. The system captures around 100% of the flash vapour steam generated in processing, recompresses it, and feeds it back into the line as high-pressure process steam. After start-up, the plant no longer depends on external boiler steam for production.

The results across the line are substantial. Cooling water circulation has fallen by up to 31-33 m³ an hour. Fresh steam demand is down by around 1,650 kg an hour. Annual CO₂ emissions from the operation have dropped by more than 1,000 tonnes, with further savings on water treatment, pumping, and cooling tower running costs.

How the technology works

SteamRecycle™ is built on Mechanical Vapour Recompression (MVR), a heat recovery principle in which low-pressure vapour from a process is captured and mechanically recompressed back into usable, high-pressure steam. Rather than condensing excess vapour and discarding the heat, the system keeps that energy in the production loop.

For UHT infusion, this matters because the process requires both large quantities of fresh boiler steam to heat the product and large quantities of cooling water to condense the resulting vapour. SteamRecycle™ removes most of that demand at source, while preserving the product quality advantages of infusion processing. With proven commercial operation, the technology has scaling potential across dairy and nutritional beverage plants worldwide.

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