Abstract
The large potential for waste resource and heat recovery in industry has been motivating research toward increasing efficiency. Process integration methods have proven to be effective tools in improving industrial sites while decreasing their resource and energy consumption; however, location aspects and their impact are generally overlooked. This paper presents a method based on process integration, which considers the location of plants. The impact of the locations is included within the mixed integer linear programming framework in the form of heat losses, temperature and pressure drop, and piping cost. The objective function is selected as minimisation of the total cost of the system excluding piping cost and ϵ -constraints are applied on the piping cost to systematically generate multiple solutions. The method is applied to a case study with industrial plants from different sectors. First, the interaction between two plants and their utility integration are illustrated, depending on the piping cost limit which results in the heat pump and boiler on one site being gradually replaced by excess heat recovered from the other plant. Then, the optimisation of the whole system is carried out, as a large-scale application. At low piping cost allowances, heat is shared through high pressure steam in above-ground pipes, while at higher piping cost limits the system switches toward lower pressure steam sharing in underground pipes. Compared to the business-as-usual operation of the sites, the optimal solution obtained with the proposed method leads to 20% reduction in the overall cost of the system, including the piping cost. Further reduction in the cost is possible using a state of the art method but the technical and economic feasibility is not guaranteed. Thus, the present work provides a tool to find optimal industrial symbiosis solutions under different investment limits on the infrastructure between plants.
Highlights
Motivated by fluctuating energy prices, and more recently by environmental concerns, energy efficiency remains a focus of regulations, such as the Europe 2020 goals [1]
Afterwards, it was extended to total site analysis (TSA) in which the system consists of several production processes [10]
The minimum total cost with piping is obtained in Solution 6 when a cogeneration engine is installed on Site 1 and a heat pump on Site 2 while heat is shared between the sites with 1 bar steam; similar total cost results are obtained with other solutions where investments in piping are between 0 and 0.3 Me
Summary
Motivated by fluctuating energy prices, and more recently by environmental concerns, energy efficiency remains a focus of regulations, such as the Europe 2020 goals [1]. Energy consumption in industry is mostly in the form of heat; energy efficiency improvements imposed by these regulations can only be achieved by using heat more efficiently within the system. According to Bendig et al [4], this is classified as excess heat and waste heat is only the part which cannot be recovered within the process, by another process or by using an energy conversion system. This convention is used throughout this work
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