Management of energy recovery systems

Abstract

Energy intensive industries like steel making are concerned with maximising their potential for both waste heat recovery and thereby optimising the total energy use within a particular plant or process. This is even more critical with the threat of energy taxing looming on the horizon. The energy management function of the steel industry, especially that within an integrated steel works environment is well structured. One of the main problems is the lack of resources available. Thus the analysis of the “good idea” in terms of waste heat recovery is seldom undertaken. Many of these proposals take large amounts of manpower and invariably fall down at the financial appraisal stage. Thus there is a lack of confidence in these types of projects. To support the management function, a software tool has been developed to aid the analysis of potential projects using waste heat recovery. These projects tend to have long lead times and many fall down when applying individual financial criteria. This software tool has been designed to speed up this process by assigning a capability index varying from 0-1. 0 indicates a poor potential and 1 a high potential for waste heat recovery.