Case Study: Anheuser-Busch

• Industry: Food & Beverage
• Location: United States
• Estimated Savings: 1.2% Fuel Usage Reduction
• Estimated CO2 Emission Reduction: 7,561 tons per year
• Steam trap coverage per location: 25%

As a leading brewer and major U.S. manufacturer, steam traps in Anheuser-Busch breweries are critical components in the vast steam systems that power its operations nationwide.

A properly functioning steam trap releases built-up amounts of condensate and safely keeps steam inside the pipes. In some instances, steam traps can “blow through,” allowing steam to leak out of the system, wasting energy and increasing costs by requiring more fuel to be burned to generate more steam through the system. Steam traps can also fail in a closed position, which expose a plant to costly production downtime incidents and potentially catastrophic safety issues. These issues are not unique to Anheuser-Busch – in fact, they’re pervasive throughout the food and beverage industry.

Driven by the company’s net-zero ambition and 2025 Sustainability Goals, plus a desire to reduce loss and increase profitability, Barkley Edison, Steam Systems SME, and the team at Anheuser-Busch are doing something about it.

“We would do a manual audit once a year,” said Edison. “This only allowed us to get a limited view of how a particular trap was performing at a moment in time.”

And that’s assuming that steam was even on in that part of the system.

Manual audits typically require hiring an outside agency to conduct the audit, which doesn’t give a complete picture of the health of the entire steam system. Audits may be conducted at different intervals – monthly, yearly, or somewhere in between – leaving potential for a failure to go undetected for relatively long periods of time, leading to massive energy losses and excess CO2 emissions.

Scale was an important consideration for Anheuser-Busch. Manual audits in large facilities, whether by maintenance staff or an outside agency, can be difficult to synchronize with all equipment being on, requiring significant time and efforts from the team on-site to ensure the audit covers all the necessary steam traps.

According to Edison, Anheuser-Busch has been searching for a solution for continuous steam trap monitoring for more than a decade.

“If you go into a single brewery, you might find seven different types of steam trap monitors, all dead, because they required batteries.”

There can be hundreds of steam traps in a single brewery, and it can be $500-$1,000 to replace a single battery, making it difficult and costly to maintain batteries in the steam system environment.

After a series of false starts with other solutions, the team at Anheuser-Busch decided to test Everactive’s batteryless Steam Trap Monitoring (STM) solution in its Anheuser-Busch brewery in Cartersville, GA. “The batteryless technology is a game-changer and after monitoring for over a year, we were impressed with the results,” said Edison.

Everactive’s patented solution is designed to continuously monitor and analyze steam traps to deliver visibility into the steam system for cost-effective steam trap maintenance. STM is always on, collecting, transmitting, and analyzing steam trap data to offer a holistic view of the performance of the entire steam system.

STM consists of wireless sensors that continuously measure the temperature at the steam and condensate sides of the steam trap and, using a proprietary algorithm, make cloud-based determinations about the operating state of the trap. Utilizing only the heat of a steam system itself for power means no battery or ongoing maintenance is required. Since the batteryless sensors can last for decades, facility managers can deploy these sensors across the hundreds of steam traps in a plant without worrying about batteries dying, the costs of battery maintenance, or sending thousands of dead batteries into landfills each year.