Regarding the generation of time resolved industrial waste heat profiles

The timely transient energy supply or insufficient temperature levels of industrial waste heat (IWH) hinders the full exploitation of its energy and CO2 emission reduction potentials. This outlines the necessity for investigating IWH in a time resolved manner, which, however, is still widely disregarded, especially in generalized industrial energy system analyses and research. Within this study, we present our developed first-of-its-kind approach, which addresses this topic from a holistic system perspective and enables the generation of time resolved IWH profiles for all industrial subsectors. The backbone of our approach is the distinction of energy-intensive sub -sectors (e.g. Non-Metallic Minerals) and non-energy-intensive subsectors (e.g. Food & Beverage Production), as both vary in regard to their underlying process designs, production routines and data accessibility. Concerning the first group we found that time resolved IWH profiles can be generated by combining process specific data in a bottom-up manner with temperature gradients of the whole production route throughout the paradigm of discrete event simulation. We investigated further that IWH profiles of non-energy-intensive subsectors are depicted by examining existing subsector resolved waste heat fractions and combining this information with plant-specific load profiles in a top-down manner. We practically prove our findings for both groups within (1) a case study of generating IWH profiles of a real-life cement production mill as part of energy-intensive subsectors and (2) outline the analysis of waste heat fractions for the non-energy-intensive subsector of food production exemplarily. Both cases reflect the above findings successfully and with satisfactory results, which can therefore be regarded as basis for future research work concerning time resolved IWH.

Automated summary

The timely transient energy supply or insufficient temperature levels of industrial waste heat hinders its full exploitation. Investigating industrial waste heat in a time resolved manner is necessary but widely disregarded. This study presents a first-of-its-kind approach to generate time resolved industrial waste heat profiles for all industrial subsectors.