Low-grade waste heat recovery and repurposing to reduce the load on cooling towers

Shannon H. McLean , Jeff Chenier , Sari Muinonen , Corey A. Laamanen , John A. Scott

Abstract

Industrial cooling towers are often ageing infrastructure that is expensive to maintain and operate. A novel approach is introduced in which a heat pump circuit is incorporated to reduce the load upon the towers by extracting low-grade energy from the stream sent to the towers and repurposing in on-site processing operations. To demonstrate the concept, a model was constructed, which uses industrial data on cooling towers linked to a smelter

Key Words

low-grade heat recovery; heat pumps; cooling towers; energy repurposing; mineral processing; environmental sustainability

Address

Shannon H. McLean, Corey A. Laamanen and John A. Scott — School of Engineering, Laurentian University, 935 Ramsey Lake Road, Sudbury, ON, Canada
Jeff Chenier and Sari Muinonen — Sudbury Integrated Nickel Operations (a Glencore Company), Sudbury, ON, Canada

PDF Viewer

Preview uses the same access rules as Full Text PDF (subscription, purchase, or open access).

← Back to Volume 7, No. 2