Experimental investigation on a flat heat pipe heat exchanger for waste heat recovery in steel industry

The majority of the energy demand in industrial application is primarily used for heating purposes. Recovering waste heat could contribute to significant reduction of production cost and greenhouse gas emission. In this paper, an innovative heat recovery system was designed, manufactured and tested. The Flat Heat Pipe (FHP) is designed to recover the heat by radiation from hot steel rods during the manufacturing cooling process. The FHP system is composed of stainless steel heat pipes linked by a collector at the bottom and a shell and tube top header. The thermal performance of the FHP was investigated by testing the system at two positions from the barrier of the wires conveyor. The amount of the energy recovered and the working temperature of the FHP is also reported. The experimental results show that the heat transfer capability of the FHP is strongly influenced by the hot source temperature. It was observed from the results that the FHP is an innovative technology for waste heat recovery from industrial applications with high efficiency.