Mechanical Energy Recovery through Work Integration

Heat and work are two common forms of energy.  While heat integration has become a matured technology widely used for thermal energy recovery, work integration, however, has not been formally studied.  From the thermodynamics point of view, work integration could contribute significantly to mechanical energy recovery through synthesizing work exchange networks (WEN’s), where work exchangers are operated in a batch mode, while compressors and expanders as utility units operated in a continuous mode; these render WEN’s a type of sophisticated hybrid network system.  In this paper, we introduce the concept and fundamentals of work integration.  Then we present a novel thermodynamic-analysis-based method that can be used to quantitatively identify the maximum amount of recoverable mechanical energy of process systems.  Economic and environmental impact will also be analyzed.  Potential applicability of the methodology in process industries will be demonstrated by a number of case studies.