Techno-Economic Feasibility of Wastewater Heat Recovery for Cold Climates like Canada

Wastewater is an abundant and severely underutilized energy source in North America. Sewers experience predictable flow profiles and nearly constant temperatures between 18 ?C and 20 ?C year-round. When wastewater is used in conjunction with heat pumps, it can serve as an energy source and sink to provide both heating and cooling to buildings. Therefore, there exists the potential to extract significant amounts of thermal energy from the wastewater using heat exchangers, resulting in substantial economic and environmental benefits. The proposed work is to investigate the techno-econo-environmental feasibility of sewage-based hybrid wastewater heat recovery energy systems suitable for North American residential, commercial, and institutional buildings via system modeling, simulation, and optimization of such hybrid systems to be validated with experimental results from a few pilot systems currently being developed.

Faculty Supervisor:

Alan Fung

Student:

Conrad Kwiatek

Partner:

Noventa

Discipline:

Engineering - mechanical

Sector:

Energy

University:

Ryerson University