Drying Technology

An International Journal

ISSN: 0737-3937 (Print) 1532-2300 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ldrt20

A new energy efficient single-stage flash drying

system integrated with heat recovery applications
in industry

Haris Ishaq & Ibrahim Dincer

To cite this article: Haris Ishaq & Ibrahim Dincer (2019): A new energy efficient single-stage flash
drying system integrated with heat recovery applications in industry, Drying Technology, DOI:
10.1080/07373937.2019.1702557

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07373937.2019.1702557

Published online: 19 Dec 2019.

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DRYING TECHNOLOGY
https://doi.org/10.1080/07373937.2019.1702557

A new energy efficient single-stage flash drying system integrated

with heat recovery applications in industry
Haris Ishaq and Ibrahim Dincer
Clean Energy Research Laboratory, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa,
Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

A new system developed here conducts the thermal management of the flue gas from the Received 19 June 2019
cement industry and employs this heat for the drying of raw materials before reaching to Revised 1 December 2019
the preheating section. As of now, an additional amount of heat is used to provide the dry- Accepted 4 December 2019
ing section with hot air while this proposed configuration recovers the heat from the same
KEYWORDS
plant and employs it for drying purpose. This approach also results in cost saving as this Flash drying; thermal
configuration decreases the cost of heating the ambient air to provide the drying section management; ammonia
with hot air. The entire system is simulated using the Aspen Plus industrial software. A com- synthesis; flue gas recovery;
prehensive thermodynamic analysis is conducted for each component of the proposed sys- energy; exergy
tem keeping more focus on the drying section. Numerous parametric and sensitivity studies
are conducted to investigate the system performance, pressure drop and raw materials dry-
ing. The energy and exergy efficiencies of the drying process are found to be 55.6% and
24.17%. On the basis of the present results achieved, one can say that this novel configur-
ation can be proved as a benchmark for the cement industry and has the capability to
reduce the cost as well.

Introduction The industries are using a tremendous amount of

Global energy demand has been increasing rapidly
and energy sources are facing real-life challenges.[1]
All major sectors such as steel industries, cement
industries, transportation and mining consume an
immense portion of the total energy demand.[2] Flue
gases emitted by different industrial sectors namely;
steel, cement and glass include high a portion of car-
bon emissions which results in global warming. This
flue gases are released at higher temperature and offer
high room for heat recovery via thermal manage-
ment.[3] The cement industry is considered as one of
the chief contributors of greenhouse gas (GHG) emis-
sions. In a cement plant, different types of jaw-
crushers are employed to crush the rocks. This
crushed power is later mixed with other material like
lime and alumina with different concentrations in a
cement kiln. This kiln operates at 1,500
C and con-
tributes a lead role in producing cement.[4] Flash dry-
ing is a technique which is frequently employed to
dry the suspended or conveyed particles and common
applications contain several products such as slurries,
sludge, granules, filter cakes and pastes.[5]
energy described in Figure 1 while some significant
amount of energy is wasted in different forms like air
streams, flue gases and exhaust gases in the form of
heat. Waste heat can be defined as the energy associ-
ated with different waste streams of heat like exhaust
gases leaving the industry and entering into the envir-
onment. These waste heat streams then mix up with
atmospheric air and sometimes it causes environmen-
tal pollution as well. Even though recovering full
available waste heat is not technically feasible, but
there is still plenty of room available to improve the
efficient use of energy. Greenhouse gases can also be
diminished by recovering industrial waste heat.[6] The
fundamental source of industrial waste heat is the
exhaust gases ejected from heating equipment like
boilers and furnaces. These high-grade sources of
waste-heat can easily be used for preheating. The
results from different studies are extracted in this
paper to identify the industrial waste heat sources.[6]
Teixeira et al.[7] presented an economic and CO2
capture study for supersonic methanol hydrate separ-
ation from raw natural gas and CO2 drying. Their

CONTACT Haris Ishaq haris.ishaq@uoit.net Clean Energy Research Laboratory, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Ontario
Institute of Technology, 2000 Simcoe Street North, Oshawa, Ontario, L1H 7K4, Canada
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/ldrt.
ß 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 H. ISHAQ AND I. DINCER
Figure 1. Energy usage of different industries (data from ref.[2]).
study investigated the supersonic separator for the
purpose of reducing cost for post-combustion capture.
The commercial offshore gas processing units nor-
mally ends up with methanol losses which are hydrate
inhibitor during the exportation and processing of
gas. The energy usage of different industries is
described in Figure 1 in past 25 years. Steel, cement
and glass industries occupy a huge part of total energy
requirements, and these industries are also providing
with the high amount of materials production.
Currently, the leading industries with respect to the
waste heat source temperatures are steel, cement and
glass industries.[2,4,8,9]
Waste heat recovery from cement industry blast
furnace slag usually faces some contradictions by the
requirement of generating amorphous slag to use it
for cement production.[10] The Barati et al.[11] pre-
sented a study on waste heat recovery from molten
slag. The high temperature range 1200–1600
C of slag
presents some opportunities to recover the waste heat.
Presently, the work is being done of three different
technologies for recovering slag waste heat. The recov-
ery as hot steam is best developed it has the recovery
efficiency of 65%. Ishaq et al.[3] conducted thermal
management of the cement slag to produce useful out-
puts of hydrogen and electricity. The technique
employed for hydrogen production was the thermo-
chemical CuCl cycle.
Banooni et al.[12] presented a review paper on the
modeling of flash and pneumatic drying. This study
focused on different pneumatic drying approaches
used in literature and conducted an analysis for dis-
similar mathematical models and considered various
components namely; complementary equations,
balance and modeling assumptions. The drying pro-
cess was also investigated in terms of different param-
eters and numerical methods. Adnan and Hossain[13]
published a study considering the biomass drying and
gasification for hydrogen production. The wet com-
position of biomass needs to pass through the drying
process before approaching the gasifier. They investi-
gated the biomass gasification process accompanied
with drying and chemical looping combustion energy
supply option using Aspen plus software. The
designed configuration consisted of different subsys-
tem such as drying unit, gasifier, chemical looping
combustion section and gas purification process.
Paranuk[14] presented a mathematical model-based
study to calculate the adsorbers for methanol concen-
tration on zeolites and drying. Their study presented a
mathematical model employing molecular sieve zeolite
properties to describe the methanol concentration and
drying processes. They proposed a new approach for
the adsorption plants calculation for binary system
separation and design.
Dincer and Sahin[15] presented a comprehensive
study on the thermodynamic analysis for drying pro-
cess model. A new model was presented in this study
for thermodynamic analysis of drying process consid-
ering exergy approach. Exergy efficiencies are derived
as functions of heat and mass transfer parameters. A
demonstrative example was taken to validate the dry-
ing model and its applicability comparison with actual
drying processes in terms of specific exergies, temper-
atures, moisture contents, inlet and outlet exergies
and humidity ratios. This paper established the drying
process in terms of how to optimize the drying pro-
cess and selectivity of the optimal configuration of

drying process. Ezzat and Dincer[16] proposed a solar-
geothermal energy based integrated system for varies
application and considered drying as one of the major
subsystems. The useful commodities proposed by the
integrated system were industrial cooling, drying, elec-
tricity, hot water and space heating and results were
justified using energy and exergy analyses. This was
proved to be an innovative solar energy-based integra-
tion with high efficiencies of 69.6% and 42.8%
respectively.
Fernando and Amarasinghe[17] conducted a study
on the mathematical model and kinetics of the hot
air-drying process for coconut coir pith. The operat-
ing temperature for the coir pith was considered in
the range of 100 to 240
C to investigate the com-
pressed coir pith rehydration ability by means of vol-
ume expansion. The optimum temperature for hot air
drying was established at 140
C. Stenstrom[18] pub-
lished a review study on the biofuels drying processes.
This study considered various types of drying proc-
esses such as flash drying, rotary drying (requires high
temperature source) and bed dryers. The bed type
dryers offer low temperature requirement, robust
design and controlled capacity in terms of hot air
temperature.
A unique system utilizing the industrial waste
heat and utilizing it for drying purpose is proposed
in this study. Some gaps have been observed in the
open literature about an efficient recovery of the
waste heat for useful purposes such as drying. The
flue gas leaves the cement kiln at very high tem-
perature and offers the room for heat recovery. This
novel integration is simulated using Aspen Plus
industrial software (9.0). The explicit objective of the
proposed system as (i) to recover the industrial heat
offered by flue gas via thermal management, (ii)
simulate and design the drying process required
within the same industry, (iii) to employ the recov-
ered heat from industrial thermal management for
drying process and (iv) separate nitrogen from the
flue gas for ammonia synthesis. The proposed model
is investigated in term of energetic and exergetic
approach and efficiencies of the single-stage flash
drying process are established.
Methodology and system description
The proposed system is analyzed using thermo-
dynamic approach. Figure 2 displays the schematic of
the proposed system while the Aspen Plus simulation
model is presented in Figure 3. The cement industry
is taken into consideration for both purposes;
DRYING TECHNOLOGY 3
recovering heat from flue gas and employing that heat
for drying process.
Flue gas thermal management
The industrial flue gas from the cement kiln reaches
to a heater B1 at 650
C of temperature. This heater is
installed to control the flue gas temperature at 450
C
as per requirement and this additional heat is used to
meet the heating requirement for other processes. The
composition of the flue gas is presented in Table 1.
This flue gas then reaches to a heat exchanger B2. In
this heat exchanger, air is entered via cold stream S1
and flue gas enters to the heat exchanger via hot
stream S4. Some amount of heat is transferred from
the flue gas to the air as this rise in air temperature is
used for drying purpose. Fresh air is heated from the
ambient temperature to 300
C which is further
employed to drying process.
Single-stage flash drying
The hot air stream reaches the convective dryer via
stream S2 and solid raw material enters through
stream S6. This convective dryer is set to operate in
co-current gas flow direction. The heat duty of the
convective dryer is found to be 6.17 kW. The compos-
ition of the raw material which is taken into consider-
ation for drying purpose is tabulated in Table 2. The
moisture content is removed from the raw material
with the help of hot air. The significant results of the
convective dryer are arranged in Table 3. A pipeline
of 12 meters with 0.3 m inner diameter and 90-degree
pipe angle is used which gives a pressure drop of 7.24
mbar and saltation velocity is 9.77 m/s. The mixture
then reaches to the cyclone separator B6 which is set
to follow the Muschelknautz calculation method with
diameter of 0.8 meters. The detailed working of the
cycle separator is shown in Figure 4 to display the
functionality and the separation method of cyclone
separator. This cyclone separates the major moisture
part with hot air through stream S11 and solid stream
is separated out via S12. The moisture and hot air
streams are then introduced to a solid separator filter
with 6 cells and 1.48 m2 filtering bag area. This filter
further removes the remaining solids from the stream
and leaves the moisture with hot air via stream S14
and separated solids are proceeded to the mixer B9
which separates the solid raw material.
4 H. ISHAQ AND I. DINCER
Figure 2. Schematic layout of the newly designed system for single-stage flash drying.
Ammonia synthesis
The industrial flue gas first passes through a heat
exchanger B2 where it transfers some heat to the drying
air. This flue gas reaches to a separator via stream S5
where nitrogen is separated from the flue gas for ammo-
nia synthesis. Hydrogen gas is preheated to 100
C via
heater B11 and entered in the first reactor B13.
According to the stoichiometric calculations, 3 moles of
hydrogen reacts with 1 mole of nitrogen to produce 2
moles of ammonia. The ammonia synthesis reaction is
carried out at 350
C and 50 bar pressure. The fractional
conversion of nitrogen is assumed to be 0.25 and output
of the first reactor is fed to the second reactor B14 which
works under same operating conditions to achieve high
conversion rate. The synthesized ammonia is then sepa-
rated with the help of separator B15 via stream S24. The
stoichiometric reaction is as follows:
3 H2 þ N2 ! 2 NH3
Analysis
The proposed system conducts the comprehensive
energy and exergy analyses for every individual com-
ponent of the proposed system. Aspen plus industrial
software is employed to simulate the proposed config-
uration under IDEAL property method and to con-
duct the sensitivity analyses as well. The proposed
system mainly comprises of the thermal management
of the flue gas, raw materials drying via hot air stream
and ammonia synthesis unit. Each component is
passed through energy and exergy analyses and equa-
tions for these analyses are described in this section.
The following assumptions are made for the present
analysis and assessment. The steady state operating
conditions and no heat losses are considered during
analysis. The gases are treated as real, and both phys-
ical and chemical exergies are considered. These are
selected to make it as practical as possible.
Furthermore, except the gases included in the
 DRYING TECHNOLOGY 5

Figure 3. Aspen Plus flowsheet diagram of the proposed system displaying the thermal management and utilization of recovered
heat for drying.

Table 1. Flue gas composition. industrial software Aspen Plus. The 25
C and of
Composition Wt % 101.3 kPa are assumed to be ambient temperature
H2O 5.6 and pressure.
N2 14.3 Heater B1
CO2 72.1
O2 5.9
Ar 2.1 _ s4 hs4 þ Q_ out
_ s3 hs3 ¼ m
m (1)
 
T
_ s4 exs4 þ Q_ out 1  _ d
0
chemical exergy calculations, all gases are considered _ s3 exs3 ¼ m
m þ Ex (2)
as real gases. The IDEAL property method is used in T
6 H. ISHAQ AND I. DINCER

Table 2. Raw material composition for drying process.

Ingredients Chemical composition Wt %
Moisture H2O 8.08
Lime CaO 62.76
Iron oxide Fe2O3 2.89
Silica SiO2 11.14
Alumina Al2O3 4.24
Potassa K2O 0.5
Sulfuric anhydrite SO3 2.48
Soda Na2O 0.21
Magnesia MgO 1.7

Table 3. Significant result of the convective dryer from Aspen

Plus simulation.
Convective drying parameters Results Units
Residence time 0.4116 s
Heat duty 6.17 kW
Solid velocity 29.15 m/s
Overall evaporation rate 0.0712 kg/s


Vapor temperature at adiabatic saturation 55.93 C
Vapor moisture content at adiabatic saturation 0.1126 –
kJ
Calculated heat transfer coefficient 0.3639 m2
C Figure 4. Separation method of cyclone separator.
 
T0
Heat recovery heat exchanger B2 m _ s16 exs16 þ Q_ out 1 
_ s14 exs14 ¼ m _ d
þ Ex (16)
T
m _ 4 hs4 ¼ m
_ s1 hs1 þ m _ s2 hs2 þ m
_ s5 hs5 (3)
Mixer B9
_ s1 exs1 þ m
m _ s4 exs4 ¼ m
_ s2 exs2 þ m _ d
_ s5 exs5 þ Ex (4)
m _ s13 hs13 ¼ m
_ s12 hs12 þ m _ s15 hs15 (17)
Convective dryer B3 _ d
m _ s13 exs13 ¼ m
_ s12 exs12 þ m _ s15 exs15 þ Ex (18)
_ s2 hs2 þ m
m _ 6 hs6 þ Q_ in ¼ m _ s7 hs7 þ m
_ s8 hs8 (5)
Separator B10
 
_ T0 _ s5 hs5 ¼ m
m _ s17 hs17 þ m
_ s18 hs18 (19)
m_ s2 exs2 þ m _ s6 exs6 þ Q in 1 
T _ d
m _ s17 exs17 þ m
_ s5 exs5 ¼ m _ s18 exs18 þ Ex (20)
¼m _ s7 exs7 þ m _ s8 exs8 þ Exd_ (6)
Heater B11
Mixer B4
_ s19 hs19 ¼ m
m _ s20 hs20 þ Q_ in (21)
_ s7 hs7 þ m
m _ s8 hs8 ¼ m
_ s9 hs9 (7)  
_ T0 _ d
_ s7 exs7 þ m
m _ s8 exs8 ¼ m _ d
_ s9 exs9 þ Ex (8) _ s19 exs19
m ¼m_ s20 exs20 þ Q in 1  þ Ex (22)
T
Pipe B5 Ammonia synthesis reactor B13
_ s9 hs9 ¼ m
m _ s10 hs10 (9) m _ s17 hs17 þ m _ 20 hs20 ¼ m _ s22 hs22 þ Q_ out (23)
_ s9 exs9 ¼ m
m _ d
_ s10 exs10 þ Ex (10)  
T0
_ s17 exs17 þ m
m _ s20 exs20 ¼ m _ s22 exs22 þ Q_ out 1 
Cyclone separator B6 T
_ d
þ Ex (24)
_ s10 hs10 ¼ m
m _ s11 hs11 þ m
_ s12 hs12 (11)
_ d Ammonia synthesis reactor B14
_ s10 exs10 ¼ m
m _ s11 exs11 þ m
_ s12 exs12 þ Ex (12)
_ s22 hs22 ¼ m
m _ s23 hs23 þ Q_ out (25)
Filter B7  
_ s13 hs13 þ m
_ s11 hs11 ¼ m _ s14 hs14 T
_ s23 exs23 þ Q_ out 1  _ d
m (13) 0
_ s22 exs22
m ¼m þ Ex (26)
T
m _ s13 exs13 þ m
_ s11 exs11 ¼ m _ d
_ s14 exs14 þ Ex (14) Separator B15
Heater B8 m _ s24 hs24 þ m
_ s23 hs23 ¼ m _ s25 hs25 (27)
m _ s16 hs16 þ Q_ out
_ s14 hs14 ¼ m (15) _ s23 exs23 ¼ m
m _ s24 exs24 þ m _ d
_ s25 exs25 þ Ex (28)
 DRYING TECHNOLOGY 7

Energy efficiency every component is investigated to justify the results. The

significant results of the convective dryer namely; resi-
The convective drying process is carried out to dry
dence time, heat duty, solid velocity, overall evaporation
the raw materials by passing hot air which carried the
rate, vapor temperature at adiabatic saturation, vapor
moisture with it. Flash drying is considered as one of
moisture content at adiabatic saturation and calculated
the most common and energy-efficient types as rotary
heat transfer coefficient are tabulated in Table 3.
drying requires high temperature heat source.
The formula for the energy efficiency of the drying
process can be expressed as: Effect of moisturized solid flowrate on the
drying process
Energy investment in the product moisture evaporation
gen ¼ The significance of these sensitivity analyses is to
Energy supplied by drying air
investigate the drying process and system performance
(29) under different conditions. One can use these sensitiv-
_ ev ðh15  h6 Þ
m ity analyses and parametric studies to scale-up the
gen ¼ (30)
_ 2 h2
m designed configuration. This physical importance of
these parametric studies is to explore the effect of
where
moisturized solid flowrate on the heat rate of the con-
m _ 6m
_ ev ¼ m _ 15 (31) vective dryer, solid residence time and pressure drop
caused in the pipe. Figure 5 exhibits the effect of
moisturized solid flowrate on the heat duty of the
Exergy efficiency convective dryer and solid residence time. The legends
Exergy efficiency is another type of methodology used are placed with the graph to represent each pattern.
to evaluate the performance index of any system. The The range of the moisturized solid flowrate is consid-
equation for the exergy efficiency is ered from 0.1 to 1 kg/s. It can be depicted that the
Exergy investment in the product moisture evaporation heat consumed by the convective dryer increase with
gex ¼ the rise in moisturized solid flowrate while the solid
Exergy supplied by drying air
(32) residence time decreases with the rise in moisturized
solid flowrate.
_ ev ðex15  ex6 Þ
m The effect of moisturized solid flowrate is investi-
wex ¼ (33)
m_ 2 ex2 gated against the pipe B5 performance in term of input
and output pressures and pressure drop in Figure 6. The
length of this pipe is 6 meters long which cause a pres-
Results and discussion
sure drop in the working stream. As the pressure drop is
The proposed system consists of some major subsystems quite less, the kPa unit is used to predict the pressure
namely; industrial thermal management, single-stage flash drop easily. The lines with three different colors are
drying and ammonia synthesis unit. Energy and exergy used to represent the three different parameters dis-
analysis for every individual component is conducted and played in the legends. It can be depicted that the

Figure 5. The moisturized solid flowrate effect on dryer heat duty and solid residence time.
8 H. ISHAQ AND I. DINCER
pressure of the input stream S9 is kept constant at
100 kPa but with the rise in moisturized solid flowrate
from 0.1 to 1 kg/s, the output pressure of stream S10
drops down from 100 kPa to 97 kPa. As the input pres-
sure remains steady and output pressure drops down, it
causes pressure drop to increase from 0 to 3 kPa.
Flue gas flow rate and conversion ratio effect on
ammonia synthesis capacity
The nitrogen gas is separated from the flue gas which is
later used for ammonia synthesis. Although this study
has key focus on drying process, it is important to inves-
tigate the performance of the ammonia synthesis unit
and ammonia production capacity. This physical
importance of these parametric studies is to explore the
functionality of the ammonia synthesis system and to
investigate how ammonia production will be effected
with the input flowrate of the flue gas and the conversion
ratios of the ammonia synthesis reactors. It is also sig-
nificant to scale-up the design configuration. Figure 7
displays the effect of the flue gas flowrate on the nitrogen
Figure 6. Solid input flowrate effect on the inlet and outlet
pressures and pressure drop in pipe B5.
Figure 7. Flue gas flowrate effect on nitrogen and ammonia
flowrates.
flowrate in stream S17 and ammonia flowrate in streams
S22 and S22. The nitrogen reacts with hydrogen at
350
C and 50 bar to produce ammonia and fractional
conversion of ammonia is 0.25. Two reactors are placed
in series to achieve high production rate. It can be
depicted from the figure that both nitrogen and ammo-
nia flowrates increase with the rise in flue gas flow rate.
Figure 8 exhibits the effect of conversion rate on the
ammonia flowrate in reactors B13 and B14. The range of
the conversion ratio is considered between 0.15 and
0.45. Both of the reactors are set to operate at the nitro-
gen fractional conversion of 0.25. With the rise in the
conversion ratio from 0.15 to 0.45, the ammonia produc-
tion flowrate increases from 3.93 to 11.8 mol/s in reactor
B13 and increases from 7.28 to 18.3 mol/s in reactor B14.
As the product of first reactor is set to be fed in the
second reactor, the ammonia flowrate stream leaving the
second reactor carrier high flowrate of ammonia.
Effect of the solid and mixed stream flowrates in
S10 on the solid and moisturized air flowrates
The key focus of this study is on the drying process
which makes it obligatory to investigate the drying
process in deep. This physical importance of these
parametric studies is to investigate the moisture ratio
in the solid stream, to scale-up the current design and
to explore the solid and moisturized air flowrates.
These studies are important to investigate the effect of
the solid and mixed stream flowrates within the same
stream S10 on the solid and moisturized air flowrates.
Figure 9 shows the effect of the solid and mixed flow-
rate of stream S10 on the moisture carrying air flow-
rate in stream S15 and dry solid flowrate in S16. It
can be depicted that the flow rate of moisturized air
and solid increases with rise in input streams. Figure
Figure 8. Effect of ammonia conversion ratio on the capacity
of ammonia synthesis.

Figure 9. Effect of solid and mixed stream S10 on moisturized
air and solid flowrates.
Figure 10. Effect of moisturized air and solid flowrates in
stream S10 on solid and moisturized air.
10 considers moisturized solid in stream S10 on x-
axis, moisturized air flowrate in stream S10 on y-axis
and investigates the effect of these two parameters on
the solid and moisturized air flowrates. The range of
the moisturized solid is taken between 0.1 to 2 kg/s. It
can be depicted that the increase in the inlet flowrate
causes outlet flowrates of dry solid and moisturized
air to increase simultaneously.
Hot air flowrate effect on the pressure drop in
filter B7
The significance of this study is to investigate the
pressure drop during the drying process. Some pres-
sure drop takes place when working stream passes
DRYING TECHNOLOGY 9
Figure 11. Hot air flowrate effect on the pressure drop in filter B7.
through filter B7. This study helps in predicting the
pressure drop in the filter. Figure 11 exhibits the effect
of hot air flowrate on the inlet and outlet pressures of
the filter. The stream S11 is the inlet stream to the fil-
ter while S14 is the outlet stream to the filter. Two
different types of lines are representing the pressures
of the inlet and outlet streams according to the
legends. The upper solid line represents the inlet pres-
sure which is a bit higher while the lower dotted line
represents the outlet pressure of stream S14. The dif-
ference in the pressures of these two streams S11 and
S14 can provide us with the pressure drop values. The
pressure of the stream S11 drops down from 99.1 kPa
to 72.2 kPa while the pressure of the stream S14
decreases from 97.5 kPa to 70.7 kPa.
Model validation
The current study proposes a new approach of recov-
ering industrial waste heat and proposes an integra-
tion to employ the recovered heat for single-stage
flash drying within the same cement plant (Table 4).
As of now, additional heat is employed to operate the
drying section and to input the hot air while this pro-
posed configuration recovers the heat from the same
plant and employs it for drying purpose. The study
proposes a new system of this nature. Thus, the sub-
systems can be validated with the literature. The pre-
sent design of drying is validated with the simulation
study conducted by Morey et al.[19] using Aspen Plus
industrial software. Dogbe et al.[20] presented a study
on the thermodynamic analysis of a sugar mill using
waste-heat recovery which can be used for the valid-
ation of the present study. An ammonia production
system using Haber Bosch process was published by
Cinti et al.[21] can be used to the validation of the
ammonia synthesis subsystem. They used the
10 H. ISHAQ AND I. DINCER

Table 4. Comparative table for the validation of the proposed system with subsystems of heat recovery, industrial drying and
ammonia synthesis.
Reference
Ross et al.[22]
Gwak et al.[23]
Adnan and Hossain[13]
Dogbe et al.[20]
Alobaid et al.[24]
Morey et al.[19]
Cinti et al.[21]
Present study
Analysis type
Pressurised flash drying of
Yallourn lignite
Flash drying system and drying
characteristics low rank coal.
Integrated drying and biomass
gasification
Thermodynamic assessment of the
sugar mill through waste-heat
recovery technologies
Numerical and experimental
investigation of a heat recovery
steam generator
Aspen Plus modeling of
superheated steam drying at a
corn ethanol plant
Integrated Solid Oxide Electrolyzer
with ammonia production plant
Single-stage flash drying system
integrated with industrial
heat recovery
Results
 Reduced coal moisture from 67 wt% to between 30 and 40 wt%,
 Yallourn lignite feed rate of 725 kg/h.
 Entrained flash drying occurred at 10 bar and 800
C.
 Pressure range between 1 to 40 bar.
 Temperature range between 200 to 600
C.
 Coal mass rate of 10 g/min.
 Coal input temperature of 25
C.
 Almost 98% of the moisture was removed.
 Dryer input flowrate of 100 kg/h.
 Feed moisture content varied between 0 and 45 wt%.
 Simulations were performed with different moisture weights of 15 wt%,
30 wt% and 45 wt%.
 Aspen Plus waste heat recovery on sugar plant.
 Integration reduced the irreversibility of sugar-drying unit by 76%.
 Cogeneration increased the exergy efficiency by 1.7%.
 The flowrate of bagasse was 6447 kJ/kg.
 The exergetic efficiency was found to be 23.6%.
 The input flowrate of the flue gas was 587.3 kg/s.
 The inlet temperature of the flue gas was 628.3
C.
 Aspen Plus heat recovery technique was adopted for
thermal management.
 Energy consumed by the superheated steam drying unit was in the
range of 759-804 kJ kg-1.
 Almost 1.3 L of water was recovered superheated steam drying unit per
liter of ethanol produced.
 Distiller dried grains dryer flowrate was 4.81 kgs-1 and fuel dryer
flowrate was set to be 3.86 kgs-1.
 Both the solid oxide electrolyzer and Haber Bosch reactor were set to
operate at 650
C.
 They achieved clean ammonia production with 40% reduction in power
input as compared with the equivalent plants.
 The consumption of electricity by solid oxide electrolyzer was dropped
down to 8.30 kWh/kg of NH3.
 The input flowrate of the flue gas was 337 kmol/h.
 The ammonia conversion ratio is 25%.
 The convective dryer requires 6.17 kW of heat duty to proceed
drying process.
 The energetic and exergetic efficiencies of the drying process are found
to be 55.6% and 24.17%.

temperature of 650
C for ammonia synthesis while generates drying process results and numerous sensi-
present study uses a series of two ammonia synthesis tivity studies are also conducted. The convective dryer
reactors operating at 350
C to achieve the effective requires 6.17 kW of heat duty to proceed drying pro-
conversion rate. cess. The energetic and exergetic efficiencies of the
drying process are found to be 55.6% and 24.17%.
This configuration design also results in cost saving
Conclusions
by cutting down the cost of heating the ambient air
This study proposes a unique idea of industrial ther- for drying process.
mal management and utilization of the recovered heat
within the industrial processes to cut down the add-
Disclosure statement
itional cost. In the proposed configuration, the system
is designed to recover the heat from cement slag and No potential conflict of interest was reported by
the authors.
use it for air heating in the drying process. Energy
and exergy analyses for every individual component
Nomenclature
are conducted and every component is investigated to
justify the results. The proposed system mainly com- en specific energy, kW
_ d
Ex exergy destruction (kW)
prises of the thermal management of the flue gas, raw
ex specific exergy (kJ/kg)
materials drying via hot air stream and ammonia syn- h specific enthalpy (kJ/kg)
thesis unit. Aspen plus software tool is not only uti- m_ mass flow rate (kg/s)
lized to simulate the proposed system but it also s specific entropy (kJ/kg K)
 DRYING TECHNOLOGY 11

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