April 2008 - Great success for GEA Wiegand in the year of their centenary.
Just seven months after having been awarded the GEA Innovation Award 2007, on the International Management Meeting of GEA Group AG in Beijing the company presented the first successes of the invention, an innovation in the production of whiskey and bioethanol using state-of-the-art mechanical vapour recompressors.
Together with a falling-film evaporator these compressors are incorporated in the process in such a clever way that considerable quantities of energy can be saved, and the CO2 emissions can be reduced to a large extent.
The process is particularly interesting for the production of whiskey because here the energy of the whiskey vapours is recovered without affecting the taste of the whiskey. For the production of bioethanol, considerable energy savings can be realized, thus minimizing the production costs and compensating the continuously increasing costs for raw materials at least in part.
For an application in the field of white biotechnology already a first plant could be successfully commissioned.