Article written by Alexandra Cooper for Food and Beverage Industry News 25/9/21

Rittal was tasked with helping PepsiCo reduce energy consumption at its Indian plants through the use of the Blue e+ cooling unit.  

Multinational food, snack, and beverage corporation PepsiCo recently contracted the services of Rittal, a German owned manufacturer and pioneer in delivering energy efficient climate control solution for enclosures. 

Rittal was contracted to work with PepsiCo’s Indian based headquarters in Gurgaon, Haryana, with a brief outlining the corporations desires to protect the environment, find more energy-efficient means of production.  

The company was confident it could meet the brief given by PepsiCo with its range of innovative and technologically advanced products and services. 

The first step for Rittal after being contacted by PepsiCo was to conduct a health check-up and detailed audit of the site’s enclosure climate control which had been installed in one of their six existing plants at Paithan (Aurangabad). 

Director of marketing and IT sales, Rittal, Mark Roberts, said one of the first problems to overcome at the site was the local climate.  

“The local climatic conditions would normally leave little room for reducing energy consumption,” said Roberts.  

“With the Blue e+ unit, PepsiCo were able to run the cooling units in free cooling mode during the cooler nights in summer and months of the year with lower temperatures.” 

Rittal engineers were able to diagnose the enclosure’s processes before handing down a detailed solution to install the correct climate control solutions. 

The Blue e+ is the latest version of the highly energy efficient cooling unit with hybrid technology.  

These cooling units have a longer service life than ones that came before, coupled with an intuitive operation as a result of touch display and intelligent interfaces.  

The audit was designed to demonstrate to PepsiCo that Rittal could bring the right solution to the table.  

Before committing to the offering from Rittal, PepsiCo ran a proof of concept of the Blue e+. 

Representatives from Rittal felt it was best to test the unit on the Beeta Conveyor because of how critical it is to the control enclosure.   

The test measured and recorded the energy consumption of the Blue e+ model against a local manufactured model, using an energy metre to do so.  

One of the unique features of the Blue e+ model is its heatpipe technology.   

“It’s the only cooling unit in the world with heatpipe technology,” said Roberts. 

“This enables the unit to operate in hybrid and full free cooling mode where the compressor and condenser do not run. This provides significant savings and reduces carbon footprint.” 

The unit creates value for the manufacturer in a range of ways, most importantly with energy, as the customer desired.  

“The Blue e+ provides the opportunity to reduce energy bills and carbon footprint, as well as increasing process uptime thanks to parts being used less and IoT connectivity alerting of potential issues,” said Roberts.  

Project outcome  

Rittal installed the non-Rittal cooling unit followed by its Blue e+ model for the course of an entire month. After which time the POC tenure results supported Rittal’s unit.  

The non-Rittal unit was run for a total of 235 hours, in 27 days, and recorded a total energy consumption of 239.7kWh.  

Meanwhile, the Blue e+ unit was run for a total of 324 hours, in 19 days, and recorded an energy output of just 38kWh. 

Comparatively, the non-Rittal unit consumes 510 watts of power while the Rittal unit only consumes 55 watts.  

The money saved between the two units is also a wide gulf, to run the non-Rittal unit for an entire year would cost $37,974, while the Rittal unit would only cost $4,095 per year.  

Once installed on site, the Blue e+ saved PepsiCo 76.56 per cent on its energy consumption. 

Shobhit Verma, PepsiCo India Holdings, was full of praise for the Blue e+ unit.  

“After analysing both of the units, we found that the non-Rittal unit was not even comparable to Rittal Blue e+,” said Verma.  

“The Blue e+ unit is very advanced and highly energy efficient. The Rittal unit was very reliable compared to the other unit, it was truly efficient.”