Heat Pump System using Waste Energy for a District Heating Application

Abstract: Nowadays, reducing energy usage as well as reducing environmental impacts due to energy efficiency measurements is very common in the industrial sector. The objective of these measurements is to achieve better sustainable energy systems. Sandvik Materials Technology (SMT) AB, one of the business areas of the enterprise Sandvik AB, is not an exception in that field. The aim of this thesis project is to analyze how to use waste energy from the cooling of a steel plant for an internal district heating (DH) system within the industrial area of SMT AB located in Sandviken, Sweden. In order to reduce the energy use, the economic cost and the environmental impacts within the industrial area. In order to achieve the aim has been studied the heat pump devices as the system to transfer the waste heat from the cooling of the steel plant to the DH system. Therefore, after the introduction to the project (part 1: Introduction) and the explanation of the aim (part 2: Aim, methodology and delimitations), the basics of the heat pumps are studied and explained (part 3: Heat pumps theoretical study). After that, the knowledge acquired in part 3 is applied to define and calculate the heat pump system which fulfill the required objectives achieving the greatest energy, economical and environmental impacts reductions (part 4: Heat pump practical study). The achieved results show that there is a great opportunity to reduce the energy use within the industrial area (until 45300 MWh per year), the economical cost (until 2 millions euros per year) and the 2 CO emissions (until 2.3 millions of 2 CO kg per year1). Therefore, the conclusion is that it must be taken into account to build the heat pump system and also that the effort of finding possible energy efficiency measurements within the industrial sector must be one priority for all the industrial companies, not only because the possible potential economical reductions, but also because of the potential environmental impacts reductions.