This project creates greenfield conceptual design packages for contact and convective drying of a full scale. In addition, it focuses on establishing a fully heat pump integrated drying process, including a selection of main components, process flow diagram, control philosophy, and draft lay out drawings.
Drying processes account for 15% of industrial energy consumption. In some processes, e.g. paper production, up to 70% of the energy is used for drying. Improving of the energy efficiency of drying processes will therefore contribute significantly to energy saving targets and to the reduction of the CO2 emissions. All bulk drying processes are either convective or contact drying. Both contact drying and convective drying are suitable for heat pump application. The installed process equipment in brown field situations is not designed to be suitable for heat pump applications both in the systems which supply process heat as well as in the heat recovery systems. Connecting a heat pump straight onto existing installations will therefore give rise to even more inefficiencies. The next step in heat pump development concentrates on heat pump process integration: drying functionality is designed including the heat pump functionality.
For an optimal design both technical and economic factors for the integral heat pump driven drying systems will be modelled and calculated looking to find the optimal balance between standardization and customization. Cost calculations for the different systems will be made to enable the establishment of economic feasibility and comparison of the different designs. The PiNCHED project is the design step towards building the full-scale systems in follow up projects.
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Anne van der Zwaan
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Acknowledgement & partners
This project is co-funded by TKI-E&I with the supplementary grant 'TKI- Toeslag' for Topconsortia for Knowledge and Innovation (TKI’s) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy.
