A total drying solution for the manufacturing industry which will make significant energy savings is being developed by a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) between the University of Hertfordshire and Secomak.

The University, which is the UK's leading business facing university, has built strong links with Secomak, the industry leader in air movement technologies and one of the outcomes of this collaboration is a total drying solution.

The solution is the result of a government funded KTP to which University of Hertfordshire graduate in Aerospace Systems, David Palmer has brought his skills in Computational Fluid Dynamics, project management and project planning to deliver a drying process which is modelled on the energy expenditure of a hybrid car and can realise up to 50 percent energy savings.

At the moment, the total drying solution is used primarily to dry bottles or cans, and the system can be customised to dry any container and also has potential to dry sheet metal or plastic extrusions.

'The big advantage of this system is that the machine is equipped with sensors which sense when product needs to be dried, rather than the dryer working all the time,' said David. 'This works in a similar way to energy saving systems in hybrid vehicles and means that the energy consumption of our machine is directly proportional to the throughput of the product.'