With increasing energy prices and more demanding competition within the manufacturing industry Swedish corporations are forced to decrease their energy needs to handle being profitable on the market.

We have with this report tried to help Nexans IKO Sweden AB in Grimsås to decrease the energy use in drying plastic granules in their cable production. We also did an inventory of their machine park for drying plastic granules at the time being.

An investigation of the market was also done to analyze what other possibilities there are for drying and what the future looks like. Our own tests were done with plastic granules to get an understanding for how the material behaves when drying it and re-moisturising it.

What we quickly discovered is that the handling of the desiccant dryers is very important to get it as economic as possible in use. It was also discovered that batch drying should be avoided as far as possible because it is uneconomical in many aspects; the material is re-moisturising among others. Another advantage with avoiding batch drying is that hot material reaches the extruder that in turn will not have to heat the material as much.