Ice cream is refreshing and with its proteins and carbohydrates is considered a source of energy. However, it also takes a lot of energy to mix ingredients like milk, dairy chocolate, sugar, and vanilla beans into the finished product. Electricity and compressed air play an important role in the thermal and kinetic processes for everything from mixing and extruding the ingredients, deep-freezing to -25°C, dipping into various chocolate coatings, through to final packaging. Energy efficiency is therefore right at the top of Unilever's list of priorities. As part of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, this global corporation has succeeded in saving more than 150 million euros in energy costs from efficiency improvements in production alone since 2008.
In the area of pneumatics too, the use of innovative developments offers the potential to save energy and thereby lower costs. In the Unilever plant in Heppenheim, the energy efficiency module MSE6-E2M has recently been deployed to reduce the compressed air consumption of a system manufacturing Magnum ice creams. Unilever and Festo worked together closely to get this prototype of the energy efficiency module to the production stage. This process also showed that it is not just in the field of energy consumption that less is more.
The Heppenheim factory is one of Unilever's main production locations for ice cream. These include well-known products from the Heartbrand line, including Magnum, Feast, Viennetta, and Carte d'Or. High production quantities form the basis for supplying other parts of the European market. Just one of the five Magnum production lines in Heppenheim produces more than 20,000 ice creams per hour. This requires a lot of energy. In order to reduce the compressed air consumption of the pneumatic components, the ability to visualize and measure compressed air consumption was of huge importance to Unilever. Previously, the consumption on the individual production lines had not been determined. “Until then we were just unaware,” said Alexander Hemmerich, Automation Engineer at the Unilever Plant, Heppenheim.“Air is not visible, so it is not immediately obvious if consumption is too high.”As part of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan there had already been successes in the plant in other areas. Energy-intensive geared motors were replaced with more efficient ones, achieving energy savings of up to 60 percent. Also, numerous 18 kW ventilators in the cooling tunnels, which previously ran for 24 hours in continuous operation, were converted to frequency converters with quadratic torque. This lowered the energy consumption of the ventilators by around 40 percent.
Heppenheim Plant
Langnesestrasse 1
64646 Heppenheim
Area of business: Production of Heartbrand ice cream