Coupling waste heat extraction by phase change materials with superheated steam generation in the steel industry

摘要

To allow a better exergy exploitation than the current state-of-the-art waste heat to power solutions in the steel industry, a new type of energy recovery system based on Phase Change Materials is proposed. In particular, the use of high temperature PCMs evolves from simply smoothing off gas temperature, as in the most recent studies for energy recovery from electric arc furnaces, to generating constant superheated steam able to feed the downstream turbine nearly at nominal load. This result is achieved by introducing an auxiliary section between the PCM Section and the steam generation one, which provides the auxiliary heat needed to level the thermal content of off gas. The auxiliary heat is extracted from the PCM units by a heat transfer fluid flowing across the inner tube of each PCM container.