Energies, Vol. 14, Pages 6741: Case Study of Multi-Period MILP HENS with Heat Pump and Storage Options for the Application in Energy Intensive Industries (Energies)

The environmental goals of initiatives such as the European Green Deal, which aims to achieve climate neutrality for the EU by 2050, increase the importance of improving and optimizing industrial processes. Mathematical optimization methods like heat exchange network synthesis (HENS) are crucial tools in enabling industry to identify potential energy savings and cost reductions. The lack of publicly available industry data suitable for comprehensive testing of novel optimization procedures is often a major obstacle in development and research. To tackle this problem for extended HENS with potential heat pump and storage integration and show the potential of energy integration in energy-intensive industries (EII), the authors introduce a set of four use-cases based on representative industrial processes from the EII. The application of a previously presented a HENS approach for the integration of heat pumps and storage on these cases resulted in a potential reduction of total annual costs up to 55.43% and total external energy demand up to 87.1%. The presented cases, their solutions, and the open-access mathematical formulation of the optimization procedure make a valuable contribution to the literature and future research in the field of HENS.