Water and Energy Efficiency Improvement of Steel Wire Manufacturing by Circuit Modelling and Optimisation

Muriel Iten, Miguel Oliveira, Diogo Costa and Jochen Michels
Additional contact information
Muriel Iten: Instituto de Soldadura e Qualidade, 4415-491 Grijó, Portugal
Miguel Oliveira: Departamento de Engenharia Química, Instituto Superior Técnico, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal
Diogo Costa: Departamento de Engenharia Mecânica, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal
Jochen Michels: Dechema Research Institute, 60486 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Energies, 2019, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-20

Abstract: Industrial water circuits (IWC) are frequently neglected as they are auxiliary circuits of industrial processes, leading to a missing awareness of their energy- and water-saving potential. Industrial sectors such as steel, chemicals, paper and food processing are notable in their water-related energy requirements. Improvement of energy efficiency in industrial processes saves resources and reduces manufacturing costs. The paper presents a cooling IWC of a steel wire processing plant in which steel billets are transformed into wire. The circuit was built in object-oriented language in OpenModelica and validated with real plant data. Several improvement measures have been identified and an optimisation methodology has been proposed. A techno-economic analysis has been carried out to estimate the energy savings and payback time for the proposed improvement measures. The suggested measures allow energy savings up to 29% in less than 3 years’ payback time and water consumption savings of approximately 7.5%.

Keywords: energy efficiency; industry; water circuits; OpenModelica; optimisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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