(313c) Self-Heat Recuperation Technology for Sustainable Process Design

The reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emission has become a major target in efforts to suppress global warming. The combustion of fossil fuel for heating produces a large amount of CO2. Thus, the reduction in energy consumption is one of the most concerned issues. So far, to reduce the energy consumption, heat recovery technology, which exchanges heat between the hot and cold streams in a process, has been applied to thermal processes.

Recently, authors have developed a self-heat recuperation technology based on exergy recuperation to reduce energy consumption of chemical processes. This technology consists of the followings; (i) a process unit is divided into functions to balance the heating and cooling loads; (ii) the cooling load is recuperated by compressors and exchanged with the heating load to recirculate the self heat in the process. Thus, applying the self-heat recuperation technology to chemical processes, not only the latent heat but also the sensible heat of the process stream can be circulated into the processes without any heat addition. As a result, the energy consumption and exergy destruction of a process can be greatly reduced in the steady state.

In this research, authors summarize the design of chemical processes based on the self-heat recuperation technology, and introduce several applications and energy saving potentials by using the self-heat recuperation technology.