D5.1: Report on Iron&Steel process sustainability criticalities analysis (Rapporti progetti di ricerca)

Type
Label
  • D5.1: Report on Iron&Steel process sustainability criticalities analysis (Rapporti progetti di ricerca) (literal)
Anno
  • 2013-01-01T00:00:00+01:00 (literal)
Alternative label
  • Dean Tomlinson (Spirax Sarco), Kai Schulze (CTP), Alessandro Brusaferri (ITIA), Franco Cavadini (Synesis) (2013)
    D5.1: Report on Iron&Steel process sustainability criticalities analysis
    (literal)
Http://www.cnr.it/ontology/cnr/pubblicazioni.owl#autori
  • Dean Tomlinson (Spirax Sarco), Kai Schulze (CTP), Alessandro Brusaferri (ITIA), Franco Cavadini (Synesis) (literal)
Http://www.cnr.it/ontology/cnr/pubblicazioni.owl#affiliazioni
  • Spirax Sarco, CTP, ITIA, SYNESIS (literal)
Titolo
  • D5.1: Report on Iron&Steel process sustainability criticalities analysis (literal)
Abstract
  • The iron-casting domain, represented by Brembo end-user within Factory-Ecomation consortium, is the test-bed for technological developments that should increase the overall sustainability of Factory working in an energy intensive domain such as those of the iron&steel industrial sectors. The initial evaluation of Brembo plant criticalities, conducted during the activities of WP2, has allowed to identify, through a bottom-up procedure, a set of elements to be tackled in order to improve seriously the environmental footprint of the factory, both from and energetic and an emissions-related point of view. The main points remarked by that analysis were that: - In energy intensive processes such as the metal casting ones, the nature of the manufacturing itself is based firstly on the introduction of energy into the products, to change their physical properties, followed by a complementary phase, where this energy is slowly re-released into the environment, but having suffered an increase of entropy. This causes the production of huge flows of low-grade, low temperature energy that is actually wasted; - Emission control is a problem that must be rethought, well beyond what the actual regulations imposes and factory satisfies. The objective is abstracting from the single case and work beyond legislation to conceive innovative solutions towards the \"near-zero\" emissions target. Starting from these elements of discussion, the following report presents the results of the activities (still on-going) initiated to define more precise specifications for the developments to be conducted during the project in terms of new technological solutions for energy recovery and emissions control. The first section of the deliverable is therefore devoted to a more in-depth analysis of the two previously identified problems, namely low-grade waste energy flows on one hand, and advanced emissions control on the other hand. The process industry utilizes thermal energy on a massive scale and rejects a significant proportion into the environment as a low-grade heat. The definition of low-grade heat is fuzzy and is somewhat related to the temperature of the stream carrying such thermal energy. Estimates of low-grade heat emissions are hard to compile accurately on a global scale but these are likely to be of the order of thousands of trillions of BTUs. In some cases, up to 50% of thermal energy consumed is eventually rejected as low-grade heat. This waste is not only uneconomical, but also environmentally damaging, since it carries a carbon footprint. Modern process plants reduced a great deal of thermal energy losses through heat integration and energy recovery. However, due to process temperature requirements, a vast amount of thermal energy denoted as low-grade heat is still rejected. In the same way, emissions characteristics for the iron casting domain, are in truth representative of a much larger scope of industrial sectors, in particular those with a very high intrinsic consumption of energy. These means that solutions conceived having the iron&steel sector in mind, will be directly re-usable for other applications. The second section of the report then faces the first of these problems, analysing the technological problem of how to recover effectively energy from low-grade flows. It proposes a preliminary approach that will be followed during Factory-Ecomation R&D activities, working both on the characteristics of the thermodynamic cycle to be adopted (optimizing its efficiency) and considering a broader picture of the plant to introduce novel concepts of \"power pushing\". Finally, the last section of the document setup the conception of innovative solutions for emissions control, starting from actual state of the art technologies, and proposing a never-before experimented adoption of thermo-fluid-dynamic simulation of the equipment main chambers to conceive optimized abatement processes. Everything reaches new level of performance thanks to the introduction of advanced, optimal control techniques never considered before for this industrial sector. (literal)
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