Capability Indices – A Simple “Look-See” Approach for Energy Recovery Systems

Abstract

Energy intensive industries like that of steel making has a considerable potential for using waste heat recovery to improve process efficiency. Although the energy managment function in this sector is well structured, like most industries it is suffering from a lack of manpower to conduct activies not deemed necessary for its sole activity. As a result the analysis of a “good or speculative idea”, especially in terms of waste heat recovery is difficult to undertake. To support the management function in this speculative area, a software tool has been developed to aid the analysis of potential projects using waste heat recovery. These projects tend to have long lead times and many fall down when applying individual financial criteria. The software tool has been designed to speed up this process by assigning a Capability Index varying from 0 − 1. 0 indicates a low and 1 a high potential for waste heat recovery systems to be implemented.