Industrial Headlines
Industrial Headlines reporter Gao Yuan: At the end of autumn and early winter of 2018, in an ordinary day, more than 70 containers were waiting to be loaded in Dalian Port, China. The destination of their trip was Myanmar, where a distributed power station was waiting for the arrival of the shipment. Few people knew what role the equipment loaded in these containers would play in the future.
Perhaps the sailing this time represents the opening of an almost incalculable global market, and the same equipment may enter all walks of life in the future, bringing huge impacts and earth-shaking changes to the global energy market.
Winning start for a new company
This is the first show of Orcan International Energy Technology Co., Ltd (OIET) in the world stage. Looking up the company's information, you will find that OlET, registered in April 2018, can be regarded as a beginner in the corporate world. As a debut work, it took the entire company three months, working almost around the clock, to prepare for this order to Myanmar. This is enough to show what kind of expectations the entire company has for this debut, i.e. looking forward that its own products can open up a future herefrom.
"We are the world's first and only technology-based company that provides standardized ORC products." The general manager of OIET is full of confidence in his products. In his description, just on the technical level, OIET has already completely defeated other competitors in the same market; the two sides are not even on the same level.
What kind of company is OlET? When you open its official website, you will see the following description: we specialize in providing customers with standardized, modular, quick-installation, maintenance-free, efficient ORC products and services, and focus on providing customers with ORC energy utilization solutions in the fields of gas turbine power stations, industrial waste heat, marine power, geothermal energy power generation, biomass gas and landfill gas power generation, etc. According to its official website, the key word among them is "waste heat power generation".
As for why there is such confidence, let's take a look at what kind of product this is. Take the equipment exported to Myanmar this time as an example. Each one is square, the length, width and height of which are the size of a standard container. There are four ports at one end of the equipment, two inlets and two outlets. According to the introduction of technicians, water or steam with wastel heat enters from the interface, and after a series of cyclic operations inside the device, the cooled water or steam will be discharged from the outlet. At the other end of the equipment, a cable is connected, through which the electric energy converted from the waste heat will be transferred.
"It's that simple." OIET's technical director introduced, "One of its biggest advantages is that it does not need to add any energy for a second time, and it can be used once connected. In other words, no more energy is wasted." According to calculations, the investment cost can be recovered in an average of 1.5 to 3 years. "The design life of our products is 20 years. Our first equipment is in Germany and has been running for 50,000 hours without failure. And there is no need for any maintenance."
"We specially designed it to be the size of a standard container, and there is a classification society certification on it." a relevant technician pointed to a sign on the equipment, "It can be directly used as a container without disassembling, which is very convenient for shipping."
OIET also stated that when the equipment arrives in Myanmar, there is no need to install it, and it is directly connected to the power generation equipment for plug and play. This is very different from the traditional waste heat power generation technology, greatly reducing the workload of on-site construction and installation, and truly achieving modularity, which is unique among all enterprises in the world.
OIET summarizes the advantages of its products as:
1. Low maintenance. The product can operate independently for a long time without separate maintenance;
2. High reliability. 50,000 hours of continuous trouble-free operation has been achieved;
3. Dynamic balance. The product adopts innovative control and dynamic response technology, achieving adaptive adjustment and stable efficient operation under 10% -110% load;
4. Automatic control. Self-start, self-diagnosis, self-optimization, with remote control function, achieving unattended operation.
5. Quality assurance. The product adopts the world's most advanced mature and reliable industrial components. The whole machine is assembled and commissioned in the factory. The consistency of the process and components guarantees the product quality. It can realize plug and play without civil construction on site.
Technical Team from Germany
This amazing technology actually comes from Germany. OIET fully undertakes and enjoys the original technology of ORCAN ENERGY AG in Germany. After ten years of unremitting efforts, the R&D team composed of a group of experts and scholars from the University of Munich created the ORC today. So, what is ORC?
According to the information, ORC is the abbreviation of Organic Rankine Cycle, which is called youji langken xunhuan in Chinese. Traditional waste heat power generation is to transfer a large amount of flue gas discharged from industrial production through a waste heat boiler to exchange and recover the waste heat, and generate superheated steam to promote the conversion of thermal energy to mechanical energy in the steam turbine, thereby driving the generator to output electricity.
The most significant difference between ORC low temperature waste heat power generation technology and traditional power generation technology that uses water (steam) as the circulating working fluid is that organic working fluids (such as R123, isobutane, etc.) are used as circulating working fluids to replace water (steam) to make a loop. Since the organic working fluid can be gasified at a lower temperature to produce higher pressure and push the expander to do work, this technology can use low temperature residual heat (waste heat) resources (such as flue gas at around 200°C, hot water at around 130°C) ) to realize valuable power generation.
At present, the company owns 22 ORC technology patents from the China Intellectual Property Office and the European Patent Office, and has obtained low-voltage and medium-voltage grid access licenses from major European countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, and Spain; obtained European EUROVENT Energy efficiency classification system "A" certification (lowest energy consumption) and Lloyd's Register certification; won the 2016 Hannover IF Industrial Design Award and 2016 German Innovation Award Top 100.
In the ORC generator set, the working fluid pump transports the organic working fluid to the preheater, where the working fluid is heated to a saturated state. Then, the organic working fluid is heated to a superheated state in the evaporator. The organic working fluid steam drives the expander to do work and drives the generator to output electrical energy. In the air cooler, the organic working fluid vapor is finally liquefied and returned to the working fluid pump to complete the entire Rankine cycle.
Compared with the conventional Rankine cycle technology, ORC technology has obvious advantages: organic medium has low boiling point, therefore it has higher utilization efficiency for lower temperature heat sources (under 200 ℃); organic medium has high density and small specific volume, and thus requires small thermal equipment; when the organic medium expands and does work, it keeps dry from low pressure to high pressure, therefore it can more effectively adapt to partial load operation and high power changes; air coolers fit better in water-deficient areas, with small footprint; with a low freezing point (below -73°C), the organic working fluid can still release energy at a lower temperature without antifreeze.
And it’s this kind of technology that brings another possibility for waste heat power generation, that is, low temperature waste heat power generation in real sense.
“Wasted” Waste Heat Resources
According to OIET, nearly 60-65% of China's industrial energy can be converted into waste heat resources. The waste heat is divided into high temperature waste heat, medium temperature waste heat and low temperature waste heat. Among them, low temperature residual heat (waste heat) refers to waste heat resources that are difficult to make effective use by conventional steam turbine generator sets, such as low pressure saturated steam, steam water mixture, flue gas below 250°C, hot water, etc. At present, domestic high and medium temperature waste heat power generation technology and equipment have also undergone rapid development, and a relatively complete industry has been formed. However, there is no effective technology to realize high-efficiency utilization of low temperature waste heat.
Therefore, there is still a lot of room for utilization of waste heat resources in China. At present, the country that uses the most waste heat resources is the United States, which has a utilization rate of 60%, and 50% in Europe, but only 30% in China. The reason why the gap is so large and the utilization rate is so low is "the technical problem." the technical staff of OIET is very affirmative on this point.
From the perspective of waste heat utilization approaches and methods, waste heat power generation is one of the most widely used forms of waste heat utilization in China. However, most of the current waste heat power generation is still concentrated at 250°C or even above 300°C. In fact, a lot of waste heat is still wasted. For OIET's equipment, the lowest power generation temperature can be as low as 90°C, which can maximize the use of resources and avoid waste.
Take this Myanmar project as an example. It is the world’s first distributed gas power station project equipped with ORC. The content of the project is to build and operate a gas power station with a total installed capacity of 90 MW. Each internal combustion engine is equipped with a standardized ORC product of OIET. Thanks to the use of high temperature flue gas discharged by the gas engine and the waste heat of jacket water, the power generation efficiency of the gas engine can be increased from 42.8% to about 50% without increasing any energy consumption under a certain ambient temperature.
"This project has a huge demonstration effect in the industry." the relevant person in charge of OIET said, "In fact, our equipment can increase the energy efficiency of internal combustion engines by 6% to 9%. Think about it, this is a great resource saving."
Immeasurable Future
At present, OIET has been able to produce 3 batches of multiple different types of equipment, which are applied to ships of various fuels in ocean, offshore, inland, etc., to recover the jacket water and exhaust heat of the ship’s internal combustion engine; to power stations fueled by natural gas, coal-bed methane, mixed gas, biomass gas, biogas, etc., as well as waste incineration power stations fueled by urban hazardous materials, municipal sludge, etc.; and to industrial waste heat and industrial process waste heat recovery and reuse, which is widely used in fields such as petroleum, chemical, metallurgy, etc.
After the "first shot" of the distributed power station, OIET has set its sights on various fields. Owing to the wide range of applicable markets, OlET cannot even clearly estimate the potential market in the future.
"Take shipping as an example." said the general manager of OIET. "As the international requirements for environmental protection are getting higher and higher, future ships will no longer be allowed to burn heavy oil, and with the replacement of oil products, fuel costs will significantly increase. At this time, every one percent increase in the efficiency of the internal combustion engine can save huge costs. Excluding the existing ships, the annual shipping market alone will increase the number of ships by no more than tens of thousands. Our products can be installed on the ship and used directly."
In the next step, OIET is preparing to continue research and development, striving to achieve direct waste heat recovery of oil products as soon as possible in addition to water and steam. The petroleum and petrochemical market behind this is waiting for companies to tap into.
At present, China has formulated the "Thirteenth Five-Year" Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Industry Development Plan, which clearly points out that the development of energy conservation and environmental protection industries is a major measure to cultivate new growth drivers and enhance green competitiveness, an important support to complement the shortcomings of resources and environment, and to improve ecological environment, and an objective requirement to promote the construction of ecological civilization and build a beautiful China.
The Party’s "Report to the Nineteenth National Congress" also mentioned that the progress of resource conservation has been comprehensively promoted, the intensity of energy resource consumption has been drastically reduced, and the consciousness and initiative to implement the concept of green development have been significantly enhanced.
With the successive introduction of various environmental protection policies, OIET is also looking forward to introducing its own equipment to all walks of life. They even have such a technical idea: "In the future, we will also develop small mobile power generation equipment to be installed on large trucks, for example, to improve the efficiency of the engine, save fuel and generate electricity. Maybe one day, the equipment will be the size of a finger and enter thousands of households and play a role in home appliances."
Editor in Charge: Tong Yana
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