Energy and Process Integration Research: Present Situation and Development Trends in Future Research
Energy supply and its efficient use in production are key to ensuring the healthy functioning of the world economies. Based on that, to ensure sustainability, the supply and use of energy have to apply the principle of minimising negative environmental impacts and even improving the environment through net-regenerative development. In this context, ensuring cleaner energy is the cornerstone for cleaner production, especially for reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, which are directly related to the types and loads of the energy sources used. This introduction presents a review of the main lessons recently learned in the area of more efficient energy use, cleaner fuels and biofuels, cleaner production, CO2 capture, optimisation and waste management. This presentation provides ideas and technologies that can be incorporated into real-world solutions and can serve as the foundations for future research. The wide topical coverage and the high quality would provide directions for future collaborative research– including process level emission minimisation, self-sufficient regions, and industrial symbiosis for optimising usage of waste heat and waste material flows. The scope covers the extensions of the Pinch Analysis for process modifications of individual processes to total site heat integration (TSHI). The Plus–Minus principle has been adapted to enable the beneficial process modification options to be selected in order to maximise energy savings in TSHI. The Total Site Profile (TSP) is divided into three regions:
(a) the region of the horizontal overlap between the Site Sink and Source Profiles, (b) the horizontal overlap region and (c) below the horizontal overlap region.
The proposed methodology identifies the options to reduce utility targets in these regions using the TSP, Site Utility Composite Curves (SCC), Utility Grand Composite Curve (UGCC), modified Problem Table Algorithm (PTA), Total Site Problem Table Algorithm (TS-PTA) and some new heuristics. The identified changes on the TSP are then linked to the specific changes in the individual processes. The illustrative case study shows that the Plus–Minus principle application in the TSHI context can further improve heat recovery. The proposed spreadsheet-based methodology combines the advantages of graphical visualisation, as well as the numerical precision.
Several real-life industrial case studies are presented as well.
Acknowledgement:
Support provided by the project “Sustainable Process Integration Laboratory – SPIL”, project No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000456 funded by EU “CZ Operational Programme Research and Development, Education”, Priority 1: Strengthening capacity for quality research.