Matching heat pump technologies with process requirements: A heat pump integration framework
Industrial process heat in the temperature range up to 200 °C accounts for around 40% of industrial final energy demand. The heat pump is a core technology for decarbonisation thanks to its Coefficient of Performance (COP) > 1. A large-scale market ramp-up is currently still being prevented by a lack of knowledge of sensible application options and a lack of standardisation. This paper presents a novel integration framework that characterises and classifies process requirements and matches them with technological concepts and their application limits and efficiencies in order to make recommendations for meaningful integration concepts. On the one hand, the method relies on thermodynamic modelling and uses pinch analysis approaches to describe the process requirements. On the other hand, the application areas and efficiencies of the heat pump technologies are modelled. A targeting algorithm scans the modelled requirements and provides technological recommendations and COPs for various areas of application - classified according to temperatures, media, temporal production behaviour and unit operations. The results are integration concepts for clusters of processes with similar requirements, such as drying, the thermal activation of solid and fluid products, and thermal separation. Suitable integration points and COP estimates are provided for various heat pump technologies.