Increasing Energy Efficiency and Sustainability in Metallurgical Processes with ORC Technology

摘要

Metallurgical processes require a considerable amount of energy. A large part of the supplied energy slips away from the process, without being utilized and in many cases a very interesting and promising (though still quite uncommon) way to take advantage of these energy streams is to convert them into electricity. Among the few mature technologies available on the market, in the last decades the Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) has proven to be a flexible and reliable technology to perform this task, i.e. using process waste heat as heat source to produce electric energy.In this paper the main features of this technology are described, showing how it may be employed to recover various temperature waste heat streams exiting metallurgical processes to produce electric energy in two specific cases.