I apologize to most of my readers as this post is not about WoW, games in general, business or even the M&S. It's about an engineering idea what I want to discuss but have no idea how to reach proper people on this field. However I try to write it in a way that everyone can understand my point so anyone who bothers to read it can understand.
Heat pumps are a very effective tools to heat a building. Their theoretical efficiency is around 600-1000%, and even cheap units that you can buy for your home are capable to 4-500%. What? Perpeetum mobile? Of course not, this efficiency (or more accurately Coefficient of Performance) means heat/electrical_energy. The heat pump doesn't create heat, it pumps from one place to another. When the heat moves from outdoors to indoors, we talk about heat pump heating, while the other way is called air conditioning. Its basic cycle is to compress gas, so it condenses while releasing heat (in the heated building), then lead the liquid out and de-pressurize while taking up heat (outside).
That's great, cheap and clean heating for our homes! Well, it is great and used in many places, yet it has limited use. Its problem is freezing. While theoretically you could pump heat while the outside temperature is below freezing point, actually you can't because the humidity of the air freezes on the evaporator unit, disabling it. To operate a heat pump you need a heat source that is above freezing point and has enough heat inside that it won't be frozen by the pump. So heat pump heating is more commmon in hotter zones where the winter temperature is usually not freezing (like Florida or Spain) or there is huge non-freezing water body is nearby (a lake, river, ocean). Alternatively you can build huge network of pipes or deep wells underground to suck out the geothermic heat. This has huge installation costs while the previous usages are situational: you either live in Florida or you don't.
However I found three heat sources that are never freezing and available to every household or commercial building and most industrial buildings too. If I'm right (and verifying it needs the expert) huge amount of fossil fuel can be saved, about 7-10% of the fuel used for heating buildings. That doesn't sound much but I'd like to remind you that every % decrease in heating use of fossil fuels decrease the carbon dioxide emission by about one hundred million tonnes per year. So if the idea works, it is huge.
The first heat source is waste air heat: you must ventilate the buildings to let oxigen in, carbon dioxide, humidity and bad odor out. When you do so, you lose the heat difference between the leaving warm and the entering cold air. Between 22oC and 2oC (which is the practical limit of a heat pump), 1m3 air contains 26kJ heat. But there is more in there as the air becomes humid from the various water sources in the heated room, like plants, breathing people, wet clothes drying and wet bathrooms. Counting with 50% relative humidity at room temperature, 1m3 air has 10g water steam inside. Steam has lot of energy, that little 10g water releases 23kJ heat if condensed. So if we don't vent the air just out of the window but drive it to the evaporator unit of a heat pump, you can recover almost 50kJ heat from every m3 air. If you replace the air fully just once in a day in an average home, you let 50*300 = 15 MJ energy go waste a day. That's about half kg of carbon dioxide.
The second heat source is heated waste water. Showering, washing, dishwashing all done by warm water that is just leaves the building into the sewers. If it would go to the evaporator unit of a heat pump, it could be recovered. An average household uses 100 liters warm water a day. That hold 100*30*4.2 = 12.6 MJ energy.
But here comes the crown jewel: if you burn fossil fuel (gas, coal, oil, wood), not all heat of the burning is gained by the building. About 15% of the energy leaves in the chimney as hot exhaust gas. There are already technologies to recover some of this energy, modern gas heaters cool down this gas to 40-50oC, but that gas is still hot and contains lot of steam. Leading this exhaust to the evaporator of the heat pump would recover this heat. How much it is? Equal to 15% of the fossil fuel burned in a simple heater and 6% on the most advanced one. That's a lot of fuel.
Of course, like any random idea of mine are free to use. So if you find this idea useful and would like to implement somewhere, feel free to. Just watch out for one thing: maybe someone else figured this out and patented it somewhere. If you know existing usages or has a question, the comment section is here for a reason!
Heat pumps are a very effective tools to heat a building. Their theoretical efficiency is around 600-1000%, and even cheap units that you can buy for your home are capable to 4-500%. What? Perpeetum mobile? Of course not, this efficiency (or more accurately Coefficient of Performance) means heat/electrical_energy. The heat pump doesn't create heat, it pumps from one place to another. When the heat moves from outdoors to indoors, we talk about heat pump heating, while the other way is called air conditioning. Its basic cycle is to compress gas, so it condenses while releasing heat (in the heated building), then lead the liquid out and de-pressurize while taking up heat (outside).
That's great, cheap and clean heating for our homes! Well, it is great and used in many places, yet it has limited use. Its problem is freezing. While theoretically you could pump heat while the outside temperature is below freezing point, actually you can't because the humidity of the air freezes on the evaporator unit, disabling it. To operate a heat pump you need a heat source that is above freezing point and has enough heat inside that it won't be frozen by the pump. So heat pump heating is more commmon in hotter zones where the winter temperature is usually not freezing (like Florida or Spain) or there is huge non-freezing water body is nearby (a lake, river, ocean). Alternatively you can build huge network of pipes or deep wells underground to suck out the geothermic heat. This has huge installation costs while the previous usages are situational: you either live in Florida or you don't.
However I found three heat sources that are never freezing and available to every household or commercial building and most industrial buildings too. If I'm right (and verifying it needs the expert) huge amount of fossil fuel can be saved, about 7-10% of the fuel used for heating buildings. That doesn't sound much but I'd like to remind you that every % decrease in heating use of fossil fuels decrease the carbon dioxide emission by about one hundred million tonnes per year. So if the idea works, it is huge.
The first heat source is waste air heat: you must ventilate the buildings to let oxigen in, carbon dioxide, humidity and bad odor out. When you do so, you lose the heat difference between the leaving warm and the entering cold air. Between 22oC and 2oC (which is the practical limit of a heat pump), 1m3 air contains 26kJ heat. But there is more in there as the air becomes humid from the various water sources in the heated room, like plants, breathing people, wet clothes drying and wet bathrooms. Counting with 50% relative humidity at room temperature, 1m3 air has 10g water steam inside. Steam has lot of energy, that little 10g water releases 23kJ heat if condensed. So if we don't vent the air just out of the window but drive it to the evaporator unit of a heat pump, you can recover almost 50kJ heat from every m3 air. If you replace the air fully just once in a day in an average home, you let 50*300 = 15 MJ energy go waste a day. That's about half kg of carbon dioxide.
The second heat source is heated waste water. Showering, washing, dishwashing all done by warm water that is just leaves the building into the sewers. If it would go to the evaporator unit of a heat pump, it could be recovered. An average household uses 100 liters warm water a day. That hold 100*30*4.2 = 12.6 MJ energy.
But here comes the crown jewel: if you burn fossil fuel (gas, coal, oil, wood), not all heat of the burning is gained by the building. About 15% of the energy leaves in the chimney as hot exhaust gas. There are already technologies to recover some of this energy, modern gas heaters cool down this gas to 40-50oC, but that gas is still hot and contains lot of steam. Leading this exhaust to the evaporator of the heat pump would recover this heat. How much it is? Equal to 15% of the fossil fuel burned in a simple heater and 6% on the most advanced one. That's a lot of fuel.
Of course, like any random idea of mine are free to use. So if you find this idea useful and would like to implement somewhere, feel free to. Just watch out for one thing: maybe someone else figured this out and patented it somewhere. If you know existing usages or has a question, the comment section is here for a reason!
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