Optimized energy use through systematic short-term management of industrial waste incineration

Abstract

The introduced work aims to systematic optimize detailed short-term scheduling for industrial waste incineration to support daily decision-making processes. The overall objective is to reduce the utilization of auxiliary fuel used to overcome waste related energy in the incineration process. The reduction is achieved through adequate mixing and scheduling of waste streams with different energy content and improved logistic strategies. With it, regulatory and technical constraints are fulfilled and holdups in production processes derived from bottlenecks in the waste treatment are avoided.The considered system consists of storage tanks, a piping network, tank wagons for waste transportation, unloading pumps and incineration lances. The optimization model is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem with a discrete time representation based on a single uniform grid. It consists of two blocks: i) waste transfer and mixing, and ii) the incineration process itself including energy calculations and constraints.The industrial case study of this work shows a saving potential of auxiliary fuel of up to 90%, leading to a reduction of CO2 emissions of up to 13%. Hence, the systematic scheduling of industrial waste incineration leads to an important reduction of auxiliary fuel consumption, resulting in economic and environmental benefits.