Waste heat recovery

Waste heat recovery captures heat that would otherwise leave an industrial process unused and reuses it for heating, power generation, or another process.

Heat exchanger: A device that transfers thermal energy between fluids without mixing them. It moves heat from exhaust gases or hot liquids into a useful stream.
Combined heat and power: The simultaneous production of electricity and useful heat from one fuel or energy source. It makes use of power-generation exhaust that would otherwise be discarded.
Thermodynamics: The study of heat, work, energy, and the physical laws governing their transformations. Its laws set the limits on how much rejected heat can become useful work.
Waste heat: Thermal energy discharged from a process without being put to useful work or heating. It is the recoverable resource that this practice seeks to redirect.
Organic Rankine cycle: A heat-engine cycle that uses an organic working fluid to generate power from relatively low-temperature heat. It converts heat too cool for conventional steam cycles into electricity.
District heating: A system that distributes heat from centralized sources to buildings through an insulated pipe network. Recovered industrial heat can supply nearby buildings through a district network.
Second law of thermodynamics: A law stating that the entropy of an isolated system cannot decrease in a spontaneous process. It explains why heat cannot be converted completely into work.
Energy efficiency: The ratio of useful output to energy input for a process or system. Efficiency improvements can reduce heat losses before recovery is considered.
Thermoelectric generator: A device that produces electrical voltage from a temperature difference through the Seebeck effect. It can turn a temperature gradient in process equipment directly into electricity.
Waste heat to power: Electricity generation using heat released by an industrial process rather than burned as its primary fuel. It is a direct route for turning otherwise rejected process heat into electricity.

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