Ammonia heat pump package using waste heat as source.

Not only environmental concerns that make ammonia, one of the oldest refrigerants in industrial use so attractive among old and new users, its excellent thermal properties enables design and installation of systems with high COPs as compared to HFCs. The main disadvantage of ammonia, however, is toxicity, smell and flammability. For this reason, most ammonia refrigeration systems are of indirect type using secondary refrigerants. A lot of processes in industry as well as district heat supply centers that require heat between 65 and 85oC, use fossil fuels. Particularly, in industrial process, there is a lot of unused waste heat that can be reused as a heat source for heat pumps. Use of waste heat in heat pump applications not only reduces use of fossil fuel but also contributes to energy conservation. This paper reports on the development and case study applications of ammonia heat pump packages that use heat sources such as condenser sink heat from existing refrigeration plants, exhaust heat from industrial plants, renewable geothermal energy among others to produce hot water with a maximum temperature of 85oC.