Recovery and valuation of fatal energies in thermal machines

Fatal energies are thermal energies dissipated into the atmosphere, such as heat, steam, fumes and other uncompensated residual energies that are discharged into the environment by industrial processes and thermal machines.

Depending on temperature levels, it is therefore necessary to recover and at least partially valorize this fatal energy in order to reduce primary energy consumption and increase the utilization rate of incoming energy, while at the same time helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In today's energy and climate context, the recovery and use of waste energy in energy production facilities is set to grow significantly, because of its capacity to improve the overall efficiency and sobriety of energy conversion, at the cost of additional technological and economic costs.

We are referring to some of the most common recovery technologies, such as heat exchangers, poly-generation systems that simultaneously produce mechanical and electrical energy, as well as heat or cold, industrial heat pumps, steam turbines and combined cycles.

In addition to the technologies developed in this article, we should not forget the use of thermoelectricity, thermoacoustics, combined turbocharging and exotic thermodynamic cycles [BE 8 061][BE 8 080][K 730] .

The same is true of geothermal energy, which is a fast-growing renewable fatal energy source, as in the Azores, which alone accounts for almost 50% of the archipelago's local production of decarbonized energy, as in many other countries [BE 8 590] .

Finally, a multi-criteria approach to the thermo-economic...