Can the heat energy from the air compressor’s circulating cooling water be recovered?
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Is it possible to recover the heat loss from air compressors?
What they recover directly is the heat from compressed air, and depending on the amount of air available, this heat can be used to generate hot water or low-pressure steam
Is the adoption rate of such recycling measures high at present? Is this considered a new technology?
Some companies have already started using it. It’s not anything complicated – it just involves adding heat exchangers, and then selecting an appropriate pump to transport the hot water depending on the distance over which it needs to be delivered. A few manufacturers here have asked us to have this system installed for them, but since our air volume is relatively low, we haven’t adopted this solution
You can try doing that; the returning water should have some pressure
To ensure the compressor operates properly, the temperature of the circulating water is generally kept not too high. ? The return water temperature here rarely exceeds 40 or 50 degrees. This temperature isn’t very useful.
I have developed at least six or seven different processes for recovering waste heat after using air compressors. Depending on the requirements of each specific installation, combining waste heat utilization with cooling is the current mainstream approach. There are many factors to consider in such designs; it’s not as simple as just adding an additional heat exchanger – the system needs to have different temperature settings for each heat exchanger in order to achieve energy savings. If you’re interested, you can communicate via in-app message.
The circulating cooling water you mentioned does recover very little heat, after all, its calorific value is too low, and it consists entirely of sensible heat. Speaking of heat recovery in air compressors, we add a secondary boiler that generates low-pressure steam between the second and third stages of the compressor – does this count as heat recovery?