One of the known problems associated with many industrial factories operating under elevated temperatures is the generation of excess heat emitted from the facility, which is not effectively utilized.
Although there could be a substantial potential of energy content in the outgoing gases, still, the typical problem associated with utilizing this potential is the fact that the hot gaseous feed stream is a by-product generated on a transient basis, e.g., an outcome of batch processes, non-constant generation of the by-product hot gases, and the like. Thus, it would be virtually impossible to rely on an essentially non-constant hot gases feed or even intermittent feed of hot gases, for running a continuous process using this heat, which is desired from economical point of view.
One way of solving this problem, is by including a storage in the system for storing the hot gases leaving the process and drawing a constant hot gaseous feed from that storage. However, this solution is impractical due to the costs associated with the need to store and compress the gases at elevated temperatures.
Another way to obtain an intermediate storage is to use a phase changing material in which the heat can be stored. However, once again the costs involved with such a process and the loss of process efficiency (due to the reduction of the temperature in the storage and retrieval processes), render this solution impractical.
Yet another way to obtain such a storage is by using materials which have high heat capacity (e.g. refractory bricks through which hot gas carrying the excess heat flows) and by heating this media, the excess heat is stored as sensible heat. Again, this solution suffers from similar disadvantages as the solutions referred to above.
In view of that, there is a need to obtain a solution that would enable utilizing the excess heat and consequently to increase the overall efficiency of the process in which the excess heat is generated.