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Waste Heat Recovery in Industrial Drying Processes

Project description

For competitive, environment-friendly Industrial Drying

Industrial Drying accounts for up to 25 % of the total energy consumption in Europe's industrial sector. This energy is primarily derived from burning fossil fuels, resulting in significant carbon emissions and the release of other harmful gases. However, these processes also generate a substantial amount of low-grade waste heat, which currently goes unused. The EU-funded DryFiciency project aims to develop and demonstrate high-temperature industrial heat pump systems. By implementing these systems, it is expected that energy savings of up to 80 % can be achieved in industrial drying processes. The project will enable the use of a closed loop heat pump for air drying processes and an open loop heat pump for steam-driven drying processes.

Objective

The overall objective of the DryFiciency project is to lead energy-intensive sectors of the European manufacturing industry to high energy efficiency and a reduction of fossil carbon emissions by means of waste heat recovery to foster competitiveness, improve security of energy supply and guarantee sustainable production in Europe. The project addresses three sectors, namely brick, waste management and food industry. The results are however of major relevance for a number of other energy-intensive industries such as e.g. pulp and paper industry.
The DryFiciency consortium will elaborate technically and economically viable solutions for upgrading idle waste heat streams to process heat streams at higher temperature levels up to 160 °C. The key elements of the solution are three high temperature vapour compression heat pumps: two closed loop heat pump for air drying processes and one open loop heat pump for steam drying processes. The DryFiciency solution will be demonstrate under real production conditions in operational industrial drying processes in three leading European manufacturing companies from the food, brick and waste management industries.
The potential of the technology demonstrated is to reduce the specific energy demand for drying and dehydration from 700-800 kWh per ton down to 200 kWh per ton of evaporated water. The energy switch from fossil fuels towards heat pump technology reduces the environmental impact considerably and offers at the same time a potential for energy savings of up to 60-80 %. This will lead to substantial reduction of energy costs and consequently lower specific product costs resulting in a significantly improved competitiveness.

Call for proposal

H2020-EE-2016-2017

See other projects for this call

Sub call

H2020-EE-2016-PPP

Coordinator

AIT AUSTRIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY GMBH
Net EU contribution
€ 1 706 583,80
Address
GIEFINGGASSE 4
1210 Wien
Austria

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Region
Ostösterreich Wien Wien
Activity type
Research Organisations
Links
Total cost
€ 1 916 298,75

Participants (20)