The objective of the project is to improve energy efficiency within the Brick and Tile dryers at Hinton Perry & Davenhill Ltd, by reducing gas and electricity consumption, and where possible the overall drying cycles. Hinton Perry & Davenhill Ltd is based in Dudley in the West Midlands and was established in 1805 and manufactures Ketley Bricks and Dreadnought roof tiles. These are long life products with a demonstrated useful life of over 100 years. With the project partners, Ceramic Drying Systems the project aims to fully study the requirements for a scheme to utilise a major thermal processing heat exchanger, that will collect all of the kiln exhaust flue gases at a wide range of high temperatures and absorb the heat into hot oil, transferring it to the drying chambers where it then passes through a further series of heat exchangers, that will release the heat contained within the hot oil back into the dryer recirculation air stream to be used throughout the drying cycle. This process change would allow for the removal of gas burners, primary air fans and waste heat supply fan, thus significantly reducing the energy consumption for this key part of our production process. We estimate that this would save around 900 tonnes of CO2 emissions, (over 10% of our CO2 emissions) and reduce our gas consumption by 12%. The project will study in detail the amount of heat available from the kiln exhausts to be transferred to dryers, the baseline energy consumption in the dryers across the cycles and product range and the requirements within the dryers to handle heat delivered via heat exchangers. The system capacity will be explored together with the requirements of the system design to enable the assessment of the technical, commercial and engineering aspects of this energy saving proposal and to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the project, identifying the resources needed for the deployment of the heat exchange solution and confirm its commercial and technical feasibility. The results will be published in a report which will be disseminated to the bricks and tile industry and made publicly available. If the feasibility study is successful, the likely next steps would be an application for phase 2 IETF funding to support the deployment of the solution.

Department of Architecture and DesignSchool of TechnologyUniversity of Wolverhampton