Integration and intensification of thermal processes to increase energy efficiency and mitigate environmental pollution for sustainable development of industry – PRES’22

Abstract

Integration and intensification of thermal processes contribute greatly to energy efficiency improvement and environmental pollution mitigation, thus, leading to the sustainable development of the industry. A wide range of topic areas have been covered by PRES’22 – e.g., Heat Exchanger Networks (HENs) optimisation, Total Site Integration, heat transfer enhancement and heat exchanger design, renewable energy, waste and fuel processing for improved energy supply, and fundamentals and novel concepts in thermal science applications. All these areas are key components of the contemporary science development directed for increase of efficiency in energy generation and usage to strengthen sustainability in industry. Being carefully selected from totally 413 conference presentations in hybrid mode (154 on site), the papers in special issue adequately represent the main topics in thermal science and engineering discussed during this event. After a thorough review, the current Special Issue accepted 15 excellent contributions that are summarised here. The general advancement observed in the selected articles is energy efficiency improvement at the process level of up to 10–15 %. This, however, has to be further combined with Process Integration measures, to achieve more significant reductions in energy demands, which is the key challenge for enabling renewable sources to become sufficient.The review also points out the future research direction that the integration of renewable energy sources (e.g., solar, wind, biomass) and waste utilisation for energy storage aroused much more attention in recent years, while the heat transfer enhancement and optimisation in energy systems are still fundamental research topics that should be intensively studied.