Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ETEKINA (HEAT PIPE TECHNOLOGY FOR THERMAL ENERGY RECOVERY IN INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS)
Période du rapport: 2020-10-01 au 2022-03-31
In the ETEKINA project, engineers have arranged many such heat pipes and created a heat exchanger design according to the specific needs of each of the production plants involved in the project: three factories producing aluminium, steel, and ceramics, respectively.
The hot production steam passes at the bottom of a container to heat the liquid inside the many tubes working together in parallel. At the other end of the heat exchanger cool air, water or thermal oil flows along, absorbing the heat of the condenser sections. This heated air or water can now be transported to parts of the production line where it can be re-used to preheat combustion air, treat automotive parts, or dry clay for example. The heat pipe heat exchanger concept developed during this project is highly scalable and can be adapted to any type of industrial exhaust in a wide range of temperatures for different heat sinks (hot air, hot water, pressurised water, thermal oil etc.). The estimated lifetime of an ETEKINA HPHE is 10 – 20 years.
The waste heat recovery system of the use case 1 (non-ferrous sector representative) was designed and implemented at Fagor Ederlan S.Coop facilities (Spain). Afterwards, the HPHE was integrated on it and the commissioning of the overall system was done. The waste heat recovery system has been running for 6 months up to now and primary energy savings of 184.5 MWh and a reduction of 33 TN CO2 eq have been measured during that monitoring period.
The waste heat recovery system of the use case 2 (steel sector representative) was designed and implemented at Metal Ravne facilities (Slovenia). Afterwards, the multi sinks HPHE was integrated on it and the commissioning of the overall system was done. The waste heat recovery system has been running for 5 months up to now and primary energy savings of 534 MWh and a reduction of 106 TN CO2 eq have been measured during that monitoring period. Because a muti sink HPHE was installed in use case 2, savings of 364 MWh of water have also been monitored.
The waste heat recovery system of the use case 3 (ceramic sector representative) was designed and implemented at Atlas Concorde facilities (Italy). Afterwards, the HPHE was integrated on it and the commissioning of the overall system was done. The waste heat recovery system has been running for 5 months up to now and primary energy savings slightly lower than 1 GWh and a reduction of almost 200 TN CO2 eq have been measured during that monitoring period.
Lowering waste energy was not the only objective of the project. Equally important was the commercial viability of the technology and a technology readiness level TRL7 has been achieved. One of the main outcomes of the ETEKINA project is an innovative fouling tolerable, high temperature resistant and cost effective with multiple contingency built-in HPHE heat recovery solution that ECONOTHERN has already included in their catalogue adding descriptions of the ETEKINA success cases. Calculations show that the Return of Investment (RoI) of the ETEKINA prototypes are extremely interesting for a commercial exploitation. Under market conditions, the HPHE of the aluminium foundry and the ceramics plant both reach a RoI of approximately 3 years, while the heat exchanger of the steel producers achieved a RoI of only nine months.
There is also a positive political framework to introduce to the market the ETEKINA solution as energy intensive industries (EII) will be asked to be carbon neutral by 2050. If the results obtained in the three demo cases of ETEKINA would be extrapolated to similar industrial plants existing in Europe, an extremely significant impact in Europe-s energy savings could be expected with consequent CO2 emissions savings. The latter would impact directly on the welfare of the European citizen.