Edinburgh Napier University

  The textile industry is resource intensive and environmentally polluting. Textile exporting countries, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh are facing strain on their resources. Woven fabrics, require several chemical treatment processes, which consumes large quantities of hot water and chemicals, in addition to producing toxic wastewater. Mercerisation is a chemical treatment of fabrics before dyeing process; it consumes large quantities of hot water to wash the chemicals from the fabrics. In this work, we attempt to improve the sustainability of energy supply of textile mercerisation process of a textile plant in Pakistan. A solar-assisted thermal plant with waste heat recovery is proposed. Evacuated tube solar collectors combined with sensible heat storage are considered. A detailed thermodynamic modelling and simulation is carried out using TRNSYS software. The simulation results show around 50% reduction in the annual energy consumption. The results also show that heat recovery contributes a larger share of the energy savings, therefore, it is potentially more beneficial in continuous textile plants. Investigation of the effect of solar field size and storage are also carried out. It is found that there is linear dependency between solar share and solar plant size.