Industrial waste heat recovery strategies in urban contexts: A performance comparison

In increasingly populated urban areas, the optimization of energy resources is of vital importance not only for economic and ethical reasons, but also to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Industrial plants and factories usually located around cities often require (and in some case also dissipate) large amounts of energy. As known, the waste heat generated by high-temperature industrial processes can be partially recovered for a variety of applications. Unfortunately, cost and efficiency issues limit the feasibility of some of these solutions. In this paper two possible waste heat recovery strategies are described and compared, i.e. electrical generation based on Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) and District Heating (DH). The proposed analysis focuses on the recovery of the waste heat produced by foundries and it relies on the experimental data collected in a real case study. Several simulation results, based on such experimental data sets, enable a reasonably fair comparison between these two heat recovery strategies, thus paving the way to the deployment of a demonstrator at SCM Foundries, Rimini, Italy.