ABSTRACT
In this chapter, five cases in which different heat pump technologies have been applied to industrial processes are described, allowing an overview of the strong and weak points of the different technologies when applied to specific applications. Boot et al. (1998) dedicated one of their chapters to applications of heat pumps in industry. They discussed processes for the concentration of flows by evaporation, drying processes and distillation processes, giving some possible arrangements between processes and heat pumps. An extensive overview of heat pump application cases is given in Task 4 of Annexes 13 and 35 of the International Energy Agency (IEA) on the application of industrial heat pumps (IEA, 2014). The organization of this report with application cases per country makes it less accessible, but the summary helps provide an overview of the reported cases. Most of these applications have supply temperatures below 90°C, indicating that higher temperatures are still more difficult to attain. Except for the ejector heat pump (EHP) case discussed in this chapter, all cases discussed have supply temperatures above 110°C and in the range 110°C to 165°C, illustrating that such supply temperatures should not be a problem for industrial heat pumps.
