Recover your wasted heat and put it to work to replace fossil fuels in your industrial process.
Your cooling systems and industrial processes emit a substantial amount of heat that is currently being wasted. By capturing and recirculating wasted heat within your plant and towards your production, Armstrong significantly improves the thermal efficiency of your facilities and reduces your need for primary energy. This greatly impacts the thermal decarbonization roadmap of your site by decreasing—and sometimes eliminating—the required purchase of renewable energy.
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another or moved from place to place.
—Law of Conservation of Energy, the First Law of Thermodynamics
Do you know how much energy you are actually wasting?
Industrial heating systems are typically built around steam boilers that generate heat by burning natural gas, coal, or other carbon-based fuel sources. Optimal steam system efficiency can exceed 80%, but most site installations don’t even reach 60% efficiency. Typically, only a limited amount of heat is transferred to the product, while a significant portion of the primary energy is released as low-temperature wet air through stacks.
Traditional cooling systems extract heat from the air or a product and move it to cooling towers or dry coolers, where it is eventually released into the environment—and wasted. As competition for renewable resources increases, wouldn’t it make more sense to add that wasted heat back into your processes, after raising its temperature?
Industrial Heat accounts for 29% of global energy demand and 31% of that heat is used below 150°C / 300°F.
—BloombergNEF / World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD)
“How to Put Waste Heat Back Into Industrial Processes and Beyond”
Armstrong Has a Better Solution—For Your Company and the Planet
Circular Thermal℠ makes a fundamental change in thermal utility systems by using steam only for applications above 120°C (250°F). Because hot water systems have higher efficiency than steam systems, hot water replaces steam for all applications below 120°C (250°F). This de-steaming not only brings a significant gain in efficiency—it also creates the backbone for using direct heat recovery, or heat exchangers, to recover high-grade wasted heat. By adding industrial high-temperature heat pumps, low-grade heat from cooling systems and process stacks can be recovered and upgraded to valuable high-grade heat.
Armstrong Converts Your Wasted Heat Into a Valuable Resource With Circular Thermal℠
While Circular Thermal℠ does increase consumption of renewable electricity for running heat pumps, its impact is significantly lower than switching to direct electrification. By recovering wasted heat, Circular Thermal℠ also significantly decreases use of primary energy—such as natural gas or coal—for heating processes. Depending on your industry, overall energy consumption for your plant could decrease by nearly 50%—without reducing available energy for your processes or level of production.
De-Steaming
The conversion of steam systems to hot water—also known as de-steaming—is a key step in optimizing thermal efficiency. De-steaming can also be applied to direct steam injection applications by choosing different technologies to achieve the same results, such as using adiabatic humidifiers to maintain humidity level in the air. Armstrong offers Pinch and Circular Thermal℠ studies to collect data and propose system optimizations. We also offer state-of-the-art equipment solutions to help you generate all the remaining hot water your plant needs at 99.7% efficiency, maintain precision hot water temperatures, and eliminate live steam in humidification.
Energy-Saving and Decarbonization Services
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- Pinch Studies
- Circular Thermal℠ Studies
More Efficient Hot Water Generation for Process or Washdown
Precision Hot Water Temperature Control
Customizable, Low Energy Consumption Humidification
EvaPack™ Adiabatic Cooling and Humidification
EvaPack™ Series Evaporative Pad Adiabatic Humidifiers Brochure
Direct Heat Recovery
In order to reach your overall energy-saving and decarbonization objectives, it’s important to ensure the maximum amount of primary energy used within your plant ends up in the process. Armstrong’s experts will help you lower energy consumption and costs, reduce emissions, and improve production and efficiency in your facilities with custom-engineered equipment and system packages for waste/process heat recovery.
Heat Transfer Solutions
- Energy recovery coils
- Condensing economizers
- Air-cooled heat exchangers
- Geothermal heat exchangers
- Focus on waste heat streams from process heating, exhaust stacks, flash vents, hot process water discharge, etc.
- Biomass air pre-heater solutions
- Low temperature heat sinks
- Complete series of coolers and heating coils
Energy-Saving and Decarbonization Services
- Pinch Studies
- Circular Thermal℠ Studies
Heat Pump Packages
Heat pumps offer a fundamental solution for thermal efficiency and decarbonization, by recovering low-temperature waste heat. Armstrong industrial high-temperature heat pumps provide a reliable, safe, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly solution for hot water generation at temperatures up to 120°C / 250°F.
Once all available waste heat from process and cooling is recovered, heat pumps can use shallow geothermal or water from rivers, lakes, or even sewage, as a heat source. Although the COP of such systems is lower than for process or cooling waste heat applications (due to lower temperature heat source), they consume only half the electrical power of a simple electric steam boiler, hot water generator or process heater.
Circular Thermal℠ Can Make a World of Difference
Decarbonizing thermal utilities in light industries cannot be achieved by simply switching from fossil fuels to renewable heat. Not only does this prove costly and often unreliable, it also wastes precious renewable energy that the rest of society needs. Including both significant waste heat sources and thermal utility sinks within a production facility provides a significant opportunity for light industries to increase energy efficiency. The resulting reduction in primary energy needs is cost-efficient and helps prevent overconsumption of renewable energy, only to be wasted.
Applying Circular Thermal℠ can result in elimination of 50% of current CO2 emissions from light industries.
Energy that can be recovered exceeds the World’s Renewable Energy Capacity added in 2021.
Circular Thermal℠ is at the Heart of Armstrong’s Decarbonization Methodology
Optimize. Minimize. Decarbonize. This is the repeatable, three-step decarbonization process developed by Armstrong’s highly experienced energy engineers. Together, optimizing and minimizing can cut your current thermal demand by more than 50%—simplifying the final, most challenging step: decarbonization of thermal generation. If, however, you move directly to decarbonization and replace fossil fuels with biogas, hydrogen, solar or renewable electricity without optimizing and minimizing first, all that renewable energy simply becomes more wasted energy.
Optimize Thermal Efficiency
Applying Circular Thermal℠ for waste heat recovery is an essential part of optimization—the no-regret first step in your Roadmap to Thermal Decarbonization. Efficiency of energy use is maximized within your plant and production processes by eliminating energy losses, de-steaming, direct heat recovery, and use of industrial heat pumps.
Minimize Process Thermal Intensity
Your baseline of utility generation is established, including fuels and energy used, efficiency, operational practices, and heat usage. Our experts identify areas within your plant and processes where energy use can be minimized or eliminated by applying solutions such as reducing setpoints, upgrading process equipment, and decreasing cycle times.
Decarbonize Thermal Generation
From installing electrifying thermal utility generation to producing heat with bio-waste, Armstrong’s engineers help you decarbonize primary energy sources by facilitating the solutions you need to reach your net-zero goal.