Technical and economical feasibility of the hybrid adsorption compression heat pump concept for industrial applications

Heat pump technologies offer a significant potential for primary energy savings in industrial processes. Thermally driven heat pumps can use waste heat as driving energy source to provide either heating or cooling. A chemi-sorption heat transformer can upgrade a waste heat source to temperatures of 150–200 °C. The specific heat transformer process however requires waste heat temperatures in the range of 120 °C, whereas waste heat sources of lower temperatures are more abundant. Using this lower temperature waste heat, and still reach the desired higher output temperatures can be achieved by the integration of a chemisorption and mechanical compression step in a single hybrid heat pump concept. This concept can offer an increased flexibility in temperatures, both for the waste heat source as for the heat delivery. chnical and economical feasibility of the proposed hybrid heat pump concept is evaluated. The range of operating temperatures of different chemi-sorption working pairs for as heat driven and as hybrid systems are defined, as well as their energy efficiencies. Investment costs for the hybrid systems are derived and payback times are calculated. The range of payback times is from 2 to 9 years and are strongly influenced by the number of operating hours, the electrical COP of the compression stage, and the energy prices.