The provision of low temperature industrial process heat in 2018 was responsible for over 30% of total industrial primary energy use in the UK. The majority of this, 75%, was produced by burning oil, gas and coal. Low temperature process heat is a major component of energy use in many industrial sectors including food and drink, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, manufacture of metal products and machinery, printing, and textiles. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with low temperature process heat generation and meet UK targets, in the long term, will require a transition to zero carbon electricity, fuels or renewable heat. In the short term this is not feasible. We propose an approach in which heat is more effectively used within the industrial process, and/or exported to meet heat demands in the neighbouring area allowing significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions per unit industrial production to be achieved and potentially provide an additional revenue source. We are going to perform a programme of research that will help provide a no regrets route through the transition to eventual full decarbonisation. The research consists of, i) fundamental and applied research to cost effectively improve components and systems performance for improved heat recovery, heat storage, heat upgrading, high temperature heat pumping and transporting heat with low loss, and ii) develop new temporal modelling approaches to predict how these technologies can be effectively integrated to utilise heat across a multi-vector energy system and evaluate a transactive modelling platform to address the complexity of how heat can be reutilised economically within energy systems. A series of case studies analysing the potential greenhouse gas reductions and cost benefits and revenues that may be achieved will be undertaken for selected industrial processes including a chemical production facility in Hull, to assess the benefits of i) individual technologies, ii) when optimally integrated within a heating/cooling network, or iii) when combined in a multi-vector energy system.

It is estimated that heat use (space heating, drying/separation, high/low temperature processing) accounts for over 70% of the total UK industrial energy use. There are significant opportunities for the improved use of low grade heat, particularly from plants which operate in a batching mode, i.e. when waste heat is generated at a different time from when there is a heat demand. The market potential for recoverable heat is estimated to be between 10TWh - 40TWh per annum. Recent developments in energy processing and the need for CO2 reduction have led to a growing interest in using this heat. To maximise the use of recoverable heat and support demand reduction there is a need for intelligent thermal/chemical storage which can be used when required, be upgraded for higher temperature applications or used to offset electricity and/or cooling demand within the plant. This ensures that heat energy which would otherwise be wasted is fully exploited. The project will bring together academic groups with expertise in thermodynamics, heat transfer and energy together with academics in business and our industrial partner, Spirax Sarco, a major UK based but global company who are major suppliers of industrial heating equipment. Our aim is to research and prove new flexible technologies that will be both wanted and used by process industries such as chemicals, paper and food processing. The systems studied will include: 1. Simple storage with later delivery at nominally the same temperature. The use of advanced Phase Change Materials (PCMs) or Thermo-Chemical reactants will give much higher energy densities (i.e. be smaller) than stores using conventional materials. Size can be a critical factor in industrial applications, but attention must also be paid to cost, corrosion issues, health and safety etc. 2. Thermal transformers that can return a fraction of the stored heat at a higher temperature than it went in. This allows some of the waste heat that would otherwise be wasted to be upgraded to steam raising temperatures for re-use. Steam is still the preferred heating medium in many process industries and possible applications are numerous. 3. Variations on Thermo-Chemical storage devices can also deliver a work (electrical) output or refrigeration rather than heat as can PCM stores in conjunction with Organic Rankine Cycles. We intent to prove, compare and contrast the economics and practicability of these options. In addition to proving the technical potential of these systems it will be essential to look at their control strategies and how they can be integrated with real products. This demands a new theoretical approach. When recovering / transferring heat between continuously operating streams the technique of pinch-point analysis is used to maximise the possible quantity of energy recovered. This is much complicated when heat inputs and outputs can be at different times. We will develop a 'temporal pinch-point analysis' to cope with the increased complexity presented. The technologies will have sufficient flexibility to be applied to different size systems and this flexibility will benefit a wide range of potential energy consumers.

Improvements of the overall sustainability of process industries from an economic, environmental and social point of view require the adoption of a new industrial symbiosis paradigm - the human-mimetic symbiosis - where critical resources (materials, energy, waste and by-products) are coordinated among multiple autonomous Production Units organized in industrial clusters. SYMBIOPTIMA will improve European process industry efficiency levels by: (a) developing a cross-sectorial energy & resource management platform for intra- and inter-cluster streams, characterized by a holistic model for the definition, life-cycle assessment and business management of a human-mimetic symbiotic cluster. The platform multi-layer architecture integrates process optimization and demand response strategies for the synergetic optimization of energy and resources within the sectors and across value chains. (b) Developing extensive, multi-disciplinary, modular and “plug&play” monitoring and elaboration of all relevant information flows of the symbiotic cluster. (c) Integrating all thermal energy sources, flows and sinks of the cluster into a systemic unified vision, as nodes of smart thermal energy grid. (d) Taking into account disruptive increase of cross-sectorial re-use for particularly impacting waste streams, proposing advanced WASTE2RESOURCE initiatives for PET. The development of such a holistic framework will pave the way for future cross-sectorial interactions and potentialities. Furthermore, the adoption of available LCSA and interoperability standards will grant easy upgradability of legacy devices and a large adoption by device producers. Modularity, extendibility and upgradability of all developed tools will improve scalability and make the SYMBIOPTIMA approach suitable both at small and large scale. Rapid transfer from lab-scale to testing at demonstration sites will be eased by the presence of industrial partners and end-users, as Bilfinger, Siemens, SXS, and Neo Group.

The UK Government the EU and the international community in general have ambitious targets for reduction of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) and Global Warming. Even though emission reduction targets to 2020 are likely to be met by the UK, longer term targets to 2050 and 2100 are unlikely to be met without substantial changes to policy and technological approaches in the generation, distribution and utilisation of energy. Globally, industrial energy use is responsible for 33% of greenhouse gas emissions. In the UK, industrial emissions have reduced in recent years and are now estimated to contribute between 20-25% of total emissions. Approximately 70% of the energy demand of the industrial sector is for heat. All heating processes result in significant quantities of waste heat, up to 50% in some cases, and is widely acknowledged that there is significant potential for heat recovery, estimated at between 18-40 TWh/yr or £0.18-0.4 billion per year at today's energy prices. As yet, most of this potential has remained unexploited due to technical, economic and organisational factors. Other opportunities for energy efficiency and decarbonisation include the optimisation of steam systems that are responsible for 35% of industrial energy use, the use of bioenergy, particularly from organic and other wastes generated on site, and whole industrial site energy integration and optimisation. To exploit the potential offered by energy efficiency, heat recovery and conversion to electrical or thermal energy at a higher or lower temperature and utilise the opportunities offered by waste to energy conversion and energy integration a number of major challenges need to be addressed. These include: i) development and application of technologies for data acquisition at high enough granularity to enable detailed analysis of performance at component, process and system level, ii) methodologies for the optimal design of technologies to provide confidence in their performance at implementation stage, iii) tools for performance analysis and control optimisation in real time, iv) modelling of energy flows at site level to provide optimisation of energy management based on energy, environmental and economic considerations, and iv) investigation and development of business models that overcome barriers and encourage the adoption of new energy efficient and demand reduction technologies. In the OPTEMIN project we aim to address these challenges by working very closely with our key industrial collaborators to: i) understand the major technical, operational and economic issues associated with the acquisition and analysis of large energy data, ii) use the data to gain insights into the complex energy networks, their interactions and impacts in large industrial manufacturing facilities, iii) critically evaluate the performance of new innovative energy demand reduction and energy conversion technologies using data from demonstration installations, iv) investigate drivers and business models that can facilitate their full development and commercialisation, v) develop methodologies and tools to optimise individual process design, whole site energy integration and management and evaluate their decarbonisation potential within the context of Government policies and decarbonisation roadmaps to 2050. The overall objective is to demonstrate through the research programme and fully documented case studies supported by comprehensive data sets, the potential to achieve energy demand and carbon emission reductions in excess of 15%.