 Flexible and stable heat energy recovery from municipal wastewater treatment plants using a fixed-inverter hybrid heat pump systemKyu-Jung Chae and Xianghao Ren Applied Energy, 2016, vol. 179, issue C, 565-574 Abstract: Among many options to improve energy self-sufficiency in sewage treatment plants, heat extraction using a heat pump holds great promise, since wastewater contains considerable amounts of thermal energy. The actual heat energy demand at municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) varies widely with time; however, the heat pumps typically installed in WWTPs are of the on/off controlled fixed-speed type, thus mostly run intermittently at severe part-load conditions with poor efficiency. To solve this mismatch, a specially designed, fixed-inverter hybrid heat pump system incorporating a fixed-speed compressor and an inverter-driven, variable-speed compressor was developed and tested in a real WWTP. In this hybrid configuration, to improve load response and energy efficiency, the base-heat load was covered by the fixed-speed compressor consuming relatively less energy than the variable-speed type at nominal power, and the remaining varying load was handled by the inverter compressor which exhibits a high load-match function while consuming relatively greater energy. The heat pump system developed reliably extracted heat from the treated effluent as a heat source for heating and cooling purposes throughout the year, and actively responded to the load changes with a high measured coefficient of performance (COP) of 4.06 for heating and 3.64 for cooling. Moreover, this hybrid operation yielded a performance up to 15.04% better on part loads than the single inverter operation, suggesting its effectiveness for improving annual energy saving when applied to highly load-fluctuating real WWTPs. To improve the overall efficiency of the heat recovery system, although the heat pump is the largest energy-consuming component, taking up 56.0–68.5% of the total energy, new efforts to develop a novel design are also needed to make the heat exchanger more energy-efficient. Keywords: Energy self-sufficiency; Heat pump; Fixed-speed compressor; Inverter-scrolled compressor; Sewage treatment plant; Heat recovery (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:179:y:2016:i:c:p:565-574 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2016.07.021 Access Statistics for this article Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier |
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