Solar Thermal Technologies and Its Application in Industry in China: A Review

In the past decades, solar heat industrial process (SHIP) have been applied and developed in the world. Demonstration projects have been built and technologies have been improved to make the solar system well integrated to industrial process. To make more penetration of solar thermal technologies to industrial processes, a lot of researches and surveys have been done to investigate heat consumption in industries. Until 2007, there are about 90 operating solar thermal plants with a total capacity of about 25MWth(35,000m²) for process heat are reported worldwide. In many countries such as America, Austria and Greece. Projects of SHIP have provided hot water or steam for the process or heat the process directly. The application concentrates on food and breweries, textile, chemical, metal manufacture and other industrial sectors. China is the one of the largest countries in energy consumption. In China, The industry sector is the backbone of China and the gross product of industry is 42.9% of gross domestic product. Meanwhile the industry amounts to 70% total energy consumption. More than 50% of the energy demand is in the form of heat with a substantial portion in the range of 60°C~250°C, which provide a favorable condition for solar application. In this paper, developments of solar collectors which is core components of the SHIP was reviewed and solar industrial process heating technologies suitable for the industry are summarized. Cases of solar thermal system for various industrial sectors are represented and analyzed. Besides, 8 industrial fields of China are selected to analyze the potential of solar industrial process heating in China. Ways to encourage thermal technologies to the industries are also made out. Potential analysis of china’s industry and solar industry presents that that if 5% of their heat demand is supplied by solar, 13million tons of coal equivalent and 40million tons of CO2 emission can be reduced annually.