A new heat pump now ensures the sustainable use of process heat at the Heuchelheim site. Until now, the heat energy generated during pressing and in the furnace processes in Hall 29 at Schunk Sintermetalltechnik (SST-GI) was released unused into the environment via recooling using cooling towers.
This is now history: the 25 degree Celsius water from the recooling system is now sent to the new heat pump. There, the temperature is raised to 65 degrees Celsius and fed into the local heating circuit. The energy generated in this way can in turn be used to heat four production halls and the SST-GI office building.
Thanks to the high efficiency of the heat pump, a heat output of 600 kilowatts is possible. By comparison, a standard domestic heat pump produces around 10 kilowatts. In total, the system can generate 2,000,000 kilowatt hours of heat per year - meaning that the investment will be amortized after four and a half years. It will also save 210,000 cubic meters of natural gas and thus around 260 tons of CO2 emissions.
Feed into the heating network planned
The heat pump was installed on schedule and has been in operation since the end of January. The aim is to produce more than 65 percent of the heating energy at the Heuchelheim site from unavoidable waste heat. This is in line with future legal requirements in Germany. In terms of concept, the use of heat pumps is suitable for all recooling systems in the Schunk Group.
Two further systems are therefore to be commissioned at the Heuchelheim site in the near future: When all three planned heat pumps are running, they will draw so much heating energy from the process heat that this could also be fed into a public heating network beyond Schunk on a pro rata basis.