Potential evaluation of integrated high temperature heat pumps: A review of recent advances

Industrial and high temperature pumps are a well-established, sustainable, and low-emission technology for processing temperatures below 100 °C, especially when driven by renewable energy. The next frontier in heat pumping is to enhance the economic working envelope to serve the 100–200 °C range, where an estimated 27% of industrial process heat demand is required. High temperature heat pumps (HTHP) are an effective technology for delivering heat and recovering waste heat from various industrial processes, hence reducing primary energy consumption and the resulting CO₂ emissions. The integration of high temperature heat pumps into different industrial process networks provides significant environmental and performance improvements,an innovative and profitable solution for different decarbonizing sectors. Higher temperature heat pumps offer significant potential to enhance thermally demanding industrial processes due to their high temperature lift capability. This review looks at how future improvements in HTHP technology can take use of breakthroughs in high-temperature heat pump research to address important technical obstacles. This review primarily consolidates data from HTHPs integrated with various industrial processes applications such as thermal energy storage, low-grade waste heat recovery, membrane fuel cell, organic Rankine cycle, super-critical water desalination, co-generation and poly-generation, vapor injection, steam injected gas turbine, and solar absorption system. However, the widespread diffusion of HP technologies faces several challenges, including technological (limitation of the electrical network due to intensive electrification of the heating sector), economic (high investment and installation cost), regulatory (lack of standards and mandatory policies), policy (uncertainty in policy and lack of clear heat decarbonization pathways and technology uptake), and public acceptance issues (unwarranted fear, misperception, misinformation, and previous experiences on the reliability of heat pumps) are highlighted.