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rafa-droppa t1_jeg9drv wrote

To me the interesting idea is industrial uses.

Take steel making for example, you have molten iron at one stage, then at a later stage you water cool it.

With further engineering you could pump the heat from the water cooling stage to heat the container of molten iron.

Obviously we're a far way from using heat exchangers to melt iron, but the point is if you can work out something like a preheat so you're heating the iron to 200F before melting it you can use a lot less energy, plus you save energy and water from the water cooling process.

So if you could reduce energy used in steelmaking by like 10% and water by 20% - that would be huge globally.

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