Careful planning and smooth cooperation speed up the evaporation plant project

Adven – News – Careful planning and smooth cooperation speed up the evaporation plant project

20th May 2025

News Industries

The new evaporation plant to be built in Honkajoki is an example of how good cooperation, careful conceptualization and pre-engineering can speed up the implementation of a project. The new case, continuation to the existing collaboration between Adven and Honkajoki Oy, was kicked off in record time and is progressing efficiently towards commissioning – the evaporation capacity will even triple.

Honkajoki Oy is Finland’s leading processor of animal by-products and will significantly expand its production in Kankaanpää during 2025. Adven has been providing the company with a by-product evaporation service since 2017. In evaporation, the liquid of the by-products is evaporated, and the remaining fraction is processed into high-quality raw materials for animal nutrition, biofuels and fertilizers.

Evaporation capacity tripled

Now Adven is implementing a new evaporation plant again based on MVR technology to meet the needs of Honkajoki’s expanding production. In MVR, the evaporated steam is fully reused, which means that the energy efficiency of evaporation can be up to 10–20 times better compared to traditional multi-stage evaporation solutions. The new evaporation plant will be a key part of Honkajoki’s production process and will help the company achieve its energy efficiency targets.

The new evaporation plant will be able to process a maximum of almost 100,000 cubic metres of various feedstocks and liquids, and at the same time it will more than triple the evaporation capacity at Honkajoki. Previous evaporation experience has been useful in the implementation of the new plant.

Installations underway – commissioning in August

The main equipment installations of the evaporation plant were started in May 2025, when the evaporator supplied by Epcon arrived on the site. During the winter and spring, a lot of preparatory work has been carried out on a broad front: Honkajoki has completed its own extension for the factory, and the interfaces for the new evaporation plant is also ready

Adven, together with its project partners, has taken care of the establishment of the site and the implementation of the necessary piping, tanks and, among other things, the control room. The principles of a shared construction site have been carefully reviewed with Honkajoki: the safety of the construction site is the priority, especially when there are several operators within the same area.

After the equipment installation, various testing will be carried out, and the actual commissioning will take place when Honkajoki starts its own processes in August. In that case, the evaporation plant must also be fully prepared to receive by-products and liquids for evaporation.

Cooperation and experience are reflected in implementation

In addition to the main equipment supplier, the project has involved more than a dozen suppliers and subcontractors, with whom cooperation has gone well. Decisions have been made in a timely manner and the experiences of the old plant have been utilized in an exemplary manner.

Although the plant is highly automated and supervised in Adven’s 24/7 operational center, there is also a need for experts in plant operation. Contractor Erno Haavisto, who operates the existing evaporator, and Jouni Korpitie, Adven’s plant operator, have already been involved in the construction of the first implementation. They have also played an important role in this project and brought a lot of valuable information from the production perspective to the development of the evaporator.

Smooth cooperation with the customer has of course been at the heart of everything, both Jani and Rauno think. The wishes of the parties regarding the development of processes and the improvement of operating and maintenance models have been well considered.

Improved serviceability and well-thought-out improvements

So how does the new evaporation plant differ from its predecessor? Not much in terms of the evaporation process itself, but improvements have been made to the washing of the evaporation equipment, such as the dosing and pumping of chemicals.

In addition, maintenance of the evaporator tower has been improved based on earlier experience, and now its opening for washing has been thought out with absolute precision. With the improvements made, the opening, washing and maintenance of the evaporator can be carried out safely even in winter.

Create the concept and pre-plan – implement and repeat

The conceptualization and pre-engineering phase of Honkajoki’s evaporation service was particularly successful with the help of several factors: we were already familiar with the customer and had a clear understanding of their needs, we knew well the implemented evaporation solution, and we had already cooperated with the main equipment supplier several times before. In addition, it was possible to utilize the simple “plan, implement and repeat” approach based on the previous oneThe conceptualization focused on improving the usability of the evaporator from the old base. A big factor was that the evaporator was largely ready made in the supplier’s production, which accelerated the process,” says Peter Degerström, Concept Manager at Adven.

Sometimes the unexpected happens, and the most surprising event in this project has probably been that the project manager’s reference trip to your equipment supplier to an expired passport!

Now there is an notification in the calendar when the passport will expire next, Rauno laughs at the situation now.

About MVR evaporation

MVR, which stands for Mechanical Vapor Recompression, is a modern evaporation solution based on closed steam circulation, which is also used in Honkajoki. With this solution, the evaporated steam is fully reused, resulting in 10-20 times better evaporation energy efficiency compared to traditional multi-stage evaporation solutions.

Condensing Honkajoki’s protein fluids is a process that requires energy consumption, but MVR helps to keep consumption as low as possible. In this way, MVR enables the production of protein hydrolysates to be both energy-efficient and low-emission.