Water and Energy Efficiency Improvement of Steel Wire Manufacturing by Circuit Modelling and Optimisation

Industrial water circuits (IWC) are frequently neglected as they are auxiliary circuits of industrial processes, leading to a missing awareness of their energy- and water-saving potential. Industrial sectors such as steel, chemicals, paper and food processing are notable in their water-related energy requirements. Improvement of energy efficiency in industrial processes saves resources and reduces manufacturing costs. The paper presents a cooling IWC of a steel wire processing plant in which steel billets are transformed into wire. The circuit was built in object-oriented language in OpenModelica and validated with real plant data. Several improvement measures have been identified and an optimisation methodology has been proposed. A techno-economic analysis has been carried out to estimate the energy savings and payback time for the proposed improvement measures. The suggested measures allow energy savings up to 29% in less than 3 years’ payback time and water consumption savings of approximately 7.5%.