Waste heat recovery potential in EVA outsoles production plant

The purpose was to simultaneously assess the feasibility of heat recovery in a proposed ethylene vinyl acetate outsole production plant as well to establish the optimal heat recovery configuration through thermodynamic analysis of the major waste streams. The considered waste heat utilization methods explain three major optimization potential and their combinations. The first two proposed methods use the heat potential of the flue gases, the initial being the water preheating applying the economizer and the second being the air preheating by installing the air preheater. The third proposed optimization describes the energy potential of condensate heat recovery. Further process optimization is analysed by applying both flue gases and condensate heat recovery together with solar energy. The greatest overall savings were identified for solar-based process utilising the combination of the condensate heat recovery and feed water as well as air preheating using flue gases, which ultimately resulted in oil savings of 76.70% with the exhaust flue gases volume decrease prediction of 76.64%. Regarding thermal pollution, the potential for minimizing atmospheric thermal pollution by decreasing the flue gases exhaust temperature from 221 °C (494.15 K) to 32.99 °C (306.14 K) was detected when combining the feed water and air preheating.