Marini Mac - India’s Greenest Asphalt Plant

Navayuga Engineering Co, Hyderabad has again chosen MARINI MAC series of asphalt plants for two more of its projects. Two of the MAC plants are already installed and churning out high quality asphalt with an industry's record low carbon footprint.

MARINI INDIA engineers, who were specially trained to provide complete assistance to clients in India, commissioned these plants.

The first MARINI MAC employed by Navayuga will shortly finish its project requirements and will be ready to be dismantled and move. With the MAC's modular concept, zero civil foundations, self-standing designs and zero ducts – Navayuga's own team is quite confident of doing the job, states Narendra Kumar, the Plant Manager.

The MAC, like all MARINI plants are designed to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week when required, enabling customers to fulfill night time contracts, carried out to avoid disruption to day time traffic. Readers are surely aware about MARINI plants exceptional performance at L&T's New Delhi International Airport Project.

Navayuga is committed to build the nation's infrastructure, with no compromise on the environment, which was the key, to the decision, to procure a series of MARINI MAC's, states Blesson Varghese Marini's National Director.

Navayuga top management team was mature and highly evolved, to realize that profitability could only be achieved by going green. The company needed to minimise plant running costs which could be achieved only by high reliability & productivity, without affecting performance and product quality.

This new generation of energy efficient asphalt plants has been developed to meet customers' demands for versatility, quality and environmentally-friendly solutions. By definition, asphalt production is an energy hungry process. To minimise energy consumption at all stages of the process, the MAC uses a combination of innovative design along with waste heat recovery systems, to bring significant energy savings throughout. Marini claims that these design concepts can bring energy savings of over 15%, whilst their high efficiency dryer and blue flame assisted burner design provide savings of up to 25%, compared with traditional designs. In parallel these savings also reduce the installed electrical capacity requirements, adds Mr Varghese.

The other reason for this strategic investment is that MAC is technically compatible with all types of asphalt, including hot, half warm and low energy mixes. The Navayuga plants are supplied with recycling capability to produce asphalt mixes with upto 35% RAP. This RAP capability could be enhanced to upto 45% in future with simple add-ons.

These MAC plants are already programmed to take on 10 additional feeders, 3 RAP feeders and various other energy efficient and green technology features. Navayuga plants are supplied with easy add-ons e.g, depending on the required layout of the storage unit for finished products, it can be configured in either under-mixer or offset format.

The under-filter storage hopper along with a graciously designed dust silo system for recovered fines ensure that hot fines are not wasted, reducing fuel consumption and making the asphalt plant even more environment-friendly. Just with the short fines recycling system and waste heat recovery system Navayuga will be able to reduce up to 2% of their total fuel consumption.

The main burner, which is designed to minimise CO₂ emission and optimise energy consumption, can be adapted to run on light or heavy fuel oil – this could be further enhanced to work on natural gas and coal. By its nature, bitumen needs to be transported and stored at elevated temperature. As a result, storage tanks can act as giant radiators if not suitably insulated, gobbling up energy and adding, in their small way, to global warming.

MARINI has been successful in significantly reducing the transfer of heat from the inner heating systems to the environment. This in turn minimizes the amount of energy that is needed to maintain an optimum storage temperature for the bitumen. The design uses a combination of traditional materials combined with a special systems design. Together with these features, a highly energy efficient heat generating unit produces spectacular energy savings compared with a conventionally design, reducing energy consumption drastically. To reduce energy consumption even further, the tanks are fitted with automatic progressive multistage heating systems, which maintain the temperature of bitumen within a preset bandwidth, independent of operator.

Safety and environmental issues are also of paramount importance in our asphalt plant design. Our optimised burners reduce CO₂ emissions, whilst special dust control designs at strategic parts of the plant ensure dust or particles are restricted from being emitted to the atmosphere. The bitumen storage tanks are fitted with a fail-safe safety system to prevent spillages. "The Marini designs represent the latest innovations in asphalt plant design and customers in India are now beginning to realize the importance of productivity and green technology, concludes Mr. Varghese.

Navayuga is upbeat about the company's new capabilities and is now preparing to repeat a similar success story at the recently awarded project site near Mangalore.