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QAI India Limited. All rights reserved.
Increasing
Throughput
through
CondensatePump
INDIA | USA | UK | CHINA | MALAYSIA |SINGAPORE
A presentation byQAI
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Innovation Case Study: Steam Condensate Pump Product Design
Innovation Case Study: Steam Condensate Pump Product Design
Project Objective: To find product design specific technological solutions to increase the discharge rate
of Steam Condensate Pump
Process: Steam Condensate Management
Organization and Industry: Leading international supplier of pumps
Case Background:As an energy saving practice, many organizations that use steam for process control
or heating take considerable effort to recover the subsequent hot condensate. This condensate (hotwater) is returned to the boiler, where it is heated and pressurized to the system requirements. When
condensate leaves the steam trap, it contains approximately 20% of the heat energy transferred in the
boiler to generate steam. Vertical displacement pressure powered pumps are a popular technical system
used to pump the condensate back to the boiler.
Figure, below shows the internals and workings of a vertical displacement pressure powered pump.
Figure: How the Pressure Powered Pump (PPP) Works
One of the challenges faced by manufacturers of PPPs is that while the pump is in the filling stroke, no
condensate is being pumped to the boiler. Adding multiple PPPs leads to increased utilization of the space
which is not available at sites since PPPs are typically installed in low space areas where manual
intervention is kept at the minimum and the environmental conditions are also harsher
The current project has been undertaken to find out technological solutions to increase the discharge rate
of the vertical displacement PPP.
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Innovation Case Study: Steam Condensate Pump Product Design
Challenges facing the organization
The team lacked a structured process for guiding the thinking process to generate innovative product
design solutions that are cost-effective and implementable.
Past attempts at product design were unable to meet all criteria set by management: cost effective, ease
of implementation, and increased throughput rate. The ideas generated by the team were either leading
to increased complexity of the product or increased costs.
Project Success criteria defined by Management
Management was exploring a structured approach to innovation that was low on complexity without
compromising the rigor and effectiveness. The following criteria were defined for evaluation of the ideas
1. Cost of implementation should be low
2. Ease of Implementation
3. Maintainability in the long run should be easy
4. Solution should result in a high satisfaction score from the user of the pump.
QAIs Consulting Approach
The project was executed in the three phases
shown in the figure.
1. Information Gathering
a) The primary objective of Information
Gathering phase is to
1. Understand the Main
Parameters of Value from a
customer perspective
i. Main Parameters of Value (MPV) are those attributes for product or service that
will have the greatest significance in the customers purchasing decision.
ii. Innovation requires a precise understanding of value: the who, what, when,
where, how, and why of the customers need. It then means getting that value
to them without complexity creeping in.
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Innovation Case Study: Steam Condensate Pump Product Design
2. Study the solutions proffered by the industry to satisfy those parameters by doing prior
art search and
3. Obtain insights into the under-served opportunities.
For the steam condensate project the study obtained detailed information related to the pump,
its components, its working environment and also all advancements made by the industry till
date. This study proved valuable in revealing that the industry had inadvertently got caught in
certain psychological traps with respect to the possible solutions directions.
2. Analysis
a) The primary objective ofAnalysis is to obtain
insights from the
Information Gathering
phase on under-served
Main Parameters of
Value.
b) It further involves a rigorous component level analysis
of the product and the analysis of the environmental
conditions to determine the opportunities for
improvement in product design.
c) The images show a snapshot of the different product
analysis such as Functional analysis, and root-conflict
analysis for the steam condensate components.
3. Concept Development
a) The next step in this project was to combine
several ideas into workable concepts and to
evaluate the concepts against the evaluation
criteria of the customer (sample snapshot shown
in figure alongside).
b) Each of the concepts were assessed on a scale of
1 to 5 where 1 stood for Very less ability to meet
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Innovation Case Study: Steam Condensate Pump Product Design
the Criteria and 5 stands for Very strong ability to meet the Criteria.
4. Deployment of the recommended changes
a) The organization has decided to deploy one of the concepts in the immediate future.
b) A patent is also being filed for this concept.
Benefits Obtained
Evaluation Parameter Before After
Patentable Concepts - 4
Patents Filed - 1
Pump Discharge Rate 100 200
(Indexed) (Index value) (Index value)
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QAI India Limited. All rights reserved.
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