Energy Recovery from an Industrial Clothes Dryer Using a Condensing Heat Exchanger

Abstract

The aim of this project was to design a condensing heat exchanger to recover waste heat from an industrial clothes dryer. Industrial cloth dryers are inefficient in their use of energy because almost all of the energy input in the dryer is wasted in the atmosphere, and thus there is great potential for heat recovery. This energy can be used to preheat the incoming cold water, and the conventional heater can then heat the water to a final temperature. The warm moist air from the dryer carries both sensible and latent heat, and in order to design this heat recovery condensing heat exchanger, the heat transfer by both mass and sensible heat has to be accounted for. The basis of this heat and mass transfer problem was the energy balance at the interface, and separate models for the calculation of latent and sensible heat transfer were used. The mass transfer coefficients were obtained from an analogy with heat transfer, and the unknown interface temperature was solved for iteratively. The data for this design was collected from a 20 kW dryer, and the heat recovery from that dryer was observed to be about 17.3%. This heat recovery condensing heat exchanger efficiency can be enhanced by the addition of more coils to the heat exchanger. An improvement in the overall results can be expected if a practical study is done on the condensation heat exchanger for an industrial cloth dryer.