September 2023: The market forces for Energy Intensive Industries to decarbonise their processes towards net zero are intensifying. Processes requiring hot water or low pressure steam are switching away from fossil fuelled gas boilers to high temperature heat pumps powered by zero carbon electricity.
The manufacturers of industrial heat pumps continue to focus their product development efforts on combining low global warming potential working fluids with high pressure compressor technologies, to increase hot water output temperatures. Recent announcements by leading manufactures using R717 (Ammonia) working fluids hot water temperatures up to 95 ºC.
Finding a waste heat source as an alternative to the air or ground, significantly increases the systems Co-efficiency of Performance, a measure of lower electrical input for heat output. Also, for higher temperature waste heat sources, currently there are commercially available heat pumps producing temperatures of 120 ºC, as pressurised hot water or low-pressure steam.
With heat from industrial processes accounting for 14% of the UK’s carbon emissions high temperature heat pump technologies will play a key role in fuel switching to electrification. This increasingly requires the expertise of companies like Heatcatcher to design, and integrate these high temperature Heat Pump technologies into new and existing industrial processes.
Article image © GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft 2023