(248j) Simultaneous Energy Integration and Low Grade Waste Heat Recovery Technologies Targeting for Eco-Transformation

Sustainability is simply the optimal management of natural resources that provides economic and social benefits to any business and its surroundings. Eco-industrial parks (EIP) can serve a significant role in realizing economic, environmental and social benefits both to individual plants and to network of companies. The Eco-Industrial park(EIP) is defined as:, “ A holistic community of businesses that cooperate with each other and with the local community to efficiently share resources (information, materials, energy, infrastructure and natural habitat), leading to economic gains, improvements in environmental quality and equitable enhancement of human resources for business and the local community” (US President’s Council on Sustainable Development).

Our EIP scope in this paper is defined as,” A geographic location that includes many adjacent industrial facilities including the industrial community’ human activities in a customized unique integration analogical to ecological system which brings value to everyone due to optimal symbiotic conditions”.

While the well planning of a grassroots EIP or the transformation of conventional industrial complexes can bring significant value to energy efficiency and energy-based GHG emissions reduction, the objective is not easy to tackle and attain even on the mathematical level since it exhibits a huge multi-variable multi-dimensional optimization problem. The customized integration among many industrial plants and non-industrial activities in an adjacent geographical location can bring in many decision variables to the “waste energy recovery” optimization problem and consequently presents a new horizon to the radical energy-based GHG emissions reduction. Fortunately, many of the reasons which were hindering the application of inter-systems integration can nowadays be addressed in cost-effective way. A holistic approach in addressing the problem in both the brownfields and Greenfields for energy resources conservation and GHG emissions reduction, which is desperately needed today, is highly warranted. It is very difficult with the current methods and tools to magically manufacture EIPs to work from scratch or to eco-transform an existing mega industrial site. The total site targeting based on the pinch technology, which is the most widely used to date, starts with intra-systems integration which means that only the waste heat of one member in the EIP is shared with other parks’ members. Certainly, such level of integration philosophy is not the ideal proactive form of true cooperation. Mathematical Programming-based techniques find huge difficulty in solving HEN problems of more than 40 streams while in the EIP problem we have more than hundreds of streams.

This paper introduces a new, approach; systematic method and software for the integration of both site-wide inter-plants integration and hybrid waste heat recovery technologies such as low and high temperature mechanical heat pumps; thermal heat pump; Organic Rankine cycle; Kalina Cycle for power generation and modified Goswami Cycle, for combined cooling, and power generation. The new systematic techniques-based software is illustrated using an industrial application to explore both the systematic inter-plants integration and the waste heat recovery technologies selection. The paper also introduces new graphical tools which enable the designer to gain insights and create initial solutions for optimal energy loads for exchange among the members to best enhance the energy efficiency and GHG emissions of the park and the best waste heat recovery technology options.