Ventobacco Curing Units

Specially designed for the U.S.A tobacco barns
By Vencon-Varsos S.A.

Worlds Best Flue Cured, Worlds Best Heat Exchanger, Worlds Best Farmers, We hope you enjoy these pictures of the worlds best tobacco. We have been very pleased with your Heat Exchanger. It has made our great tobacco even better. Linwood Vick, Vick farms Wilson N.C.

· 45 years experience in the design & manufacture of Fans & Heat Exchangers for agricultural dryers.
· 21 years experience in the design & manufacture of Indirect Fired Tobacco Curing Units & Tobacco Barns with Heat Exchangers (oil, LPG, Natural, or hot water heating coils). We have never manufactured either Direct Fired Burners.
· Over 7000 Indirect Fired Barns & Curing Units are in use all around the world. These units designed and manufactured by our company or our licensees are efficiently curing tobacco of highest quality, low in nitrosamines with remarkably low fuel consumption. In all of these units there have not been any failures due to cracks developing in the heat exchangers. The use of heavy gauge stainless steel welded by our experienced machinists coupled with our proven burner technology to heat and cool the heat exchanger uniformity reduces the likelihood of a crack.
The Ventobacco Heat Exchanger and VCU 2K are more reliable and efficient than other units, either direct or indirect fired. Our units cured better, faster and more efficiently than other units.

· With 21 years experience in the design and manufacturing of heat exchangers, we have identified 112 critical design points
· Our design and manufacturing processes controls 112 critical design points, continually upgrading and adapting the tobacco curing unit to the local conditions to ensure reliability and efficiency
· Our company possesses the expertise to adapt and fine-tune a tobacco curing unit for special conditions. We have an experienced R&D Curing team, with qualified engineers and curing advisors, assisted by our licensees & dealers in all tobacco areas, who follow closely the operation of our equipment keeping detailed data on their Curing performance, Fuel consumption & Curing duration. Data is collected and analyzed from every tobacco season in order to continuously upgrade and refine our Units and to develop more efficient curing schedules to decrease fuel consumption & curing time.

Activities in the United States:
We supplied in 1994, 12 of our R&D Indirect Fired (Electrical) rack barns "Ventolab 6"® to R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company for Research purposes.
The performance & curing results of those units helped RJR prove that simple Indirect Fired Curing can greatly reduce nitrosamines in cured tobacco leaf.
In 1999 field trials with 26 VCUs® installed on different size & make barns on 5 farms in North Carolina demonstrated in real on-farm tests that indirect curing significantly reduced nitrosamines in flue-cured tobacco. Also these trials demonstrated the efficiency of our Indirect fired Curing Units both in leaf quality & fuel consumption.
Our R&D team together with qualified tobacco experts, have worked hard the last two years, to precisely adapt the already internationally well known Ventobacco VCU® to the several different U.S. make tobacco barns.

Our VCU® can cure tobacco better, faster & cheaper than any other direct or indirect fired unit.

We have been thrilled with the performance of the VCU. We have had no problems. We have been satisfied with the tobacco that comes out of the barn cured with the heat exchanger and giving the customer what they want :good, quality tobacco Calvin Robinson Barnes Farming Corporation Spring Hope, NC

We closely follow the operation of all our Units, keeping detailed data on their Curing performance, Fuel efficiency & Gas emissions to the atmosphere.
We evaluated the data collected during the 1999 and 2000 curing seasons to refine our VCU's design to adapt it perfectly to the U.S. conditions (climate, tobacco and the many designs of tobacco barns in the US). Based on this data we also re-designed our smaller Heat Exchanger (Hexe®) for those barns having 5hp fan motors, where the farmer did not want to oversize the fan motor.
The curing performance, leaf quality and fuel consumption results from the trials in 1999 were excellent resulting in mass orders for the 2000 and 2001 curing seasons.
During 2000, with our U.S. licensee EVANS Machinery & Metal Fabrication, Wilson N.C., and our exclusive partner MARCO©, Bennettsville, S.C we have manufactured and assembled and continue to produce VCUs® & HeXe®s for our clients throughout all tobacco production areas
Over 1500 of our VCUs® & the smaller Heat Exchangers (HeXe®) s were installed and cured tobacco in different size & make barns last season (year 2000) in the U.S.A.

· Growers using these VCU's to cure tobacco in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Florida are consistently reporting:
Fuel Consumption: Same or Lower by 1-4% compared to direct fired burners which were replaced.
Curing Duration: It never exceeded the duration of Direct Fired Barns and in several cases was even shorter.
Leaf quality: According to the leaf buyers one of the best cured crops they ever had.
According to our customers some of the best and easiest cures they ever had, with remarkably low fuel consumption, without tobacco sweating, swelled stems, barn rot or other curing problems they sometimes experienced with the Direct Fired Barns.
We are pleased that our Customers are satisfied with the Curing equipment we designed and supplied. We are proud that we contributed in the world's largest Curing project ever undertaken, converting all U.S. Direct Fired Barns to Indirect Fired Units.

We know how to design &make the VCU®
· Cure better tobacco
· Easier
· Faster
· Consuming less Fuel
But we don't know how other Units, with fewer parts, can ever have similar performance.
Other Units may cure tobacco acceptably but not as easily, quickly, and as efficiently as the VCU® does.
Other Units may cost less when purchased, however farmers will have to pay more for fuel each curing season due to their higher fuel consumption.
Fuel is getting more and more expensive. Fuel has always been more expensive in Europe and Asia. We have worked for years on our VCU's® to decrease their fuel consumption to lower levels than that of Direct fired Units.

We have seen other Units all around the world consuming 40% or more fuel than our VCU's®.
Only imagine what this extra fuel means in savings per season & simply calculate how soon, a possible price difference when purchasing a VCU®, will be paid back.
Other Units may cost less but they may not have properly designed fan, precisely matched to the heat exchanger, or they may try to cure with the old fan.
They may have poorly designed Heat Exchangers - smaller, thinner metal, which may last only for few years.
They may not have proper insulation, or they may run the chimney inside the barn to increase their efficiency.

VCU® may cost a little more than other Units but it is not simply a Heat Exchanger.
VCU® is a complete High efficiency Indirect Fired Unit with:

· Heavy gauge, Stainless Steel Heat Exchanger with large heat exchange surface with flattened tubes for efficient heat transfer and to expand and contract uniformly.
· High efficiency axial fan designed to cool uniformly the Heat Exchanger & supply the barn with large amounts of air.
· Pressure burner of latest technology to secure the highest possible efficiency with low gas emissions to the atmosphere.
· All galvanized tube frame with insulated, sandwich panels on all sides.
· VCU® can be ordered with or without any of our Curing Controls.
The VCU® is the highest quality heat exchanger in the world with over 21 years of design improvements. It has demonstrated its reliability and versatility under a wide variety of curing conditions. The VCU® has proven to cure high quality tobacco with good fuel efficiency and significantly reduced nitrosamines.

[Intro] [Facts] [VCU model 2K] [Efficiency-emmisions ] [Installation Recomendation]