Energy analysis of the conventional textile washing process.

In this paper the efficiency of the conventionaltextilewashingprocess is examined. This is done by using the cumulative exergy consumption as developed by Szargut et al. Exergy is the quantity of work that can be extracted from material or energy by reversible processes. Cumulative exergy consumption shows the exergy consumption in all production steps, from the extraction of natural resources to the final product. In this paper the study on minimising the cumulative exergy consumption (CExC) of the washingprocess will be presented. In order to minimise the CExC some experiments have been performed to quantify the exergy consumption of the different process steps that occur during the washingprocess. These experiments show that the electrical heating process consumes the most exergy. Hence, different alternatives of this process are proposed. Finally, the washing performance is related to the washing temperature and the detergent quantity by performing a number of experiments. With this relation an optimum combination of washing temperature and detergent quantity can be found for the different heating systems, that results in an acceptable washing performance with a minimum quantity of CExC. It is shown that replacing the conventional electrical heating system by central heating or district heating will reduce the CExC by 35 or 57%, respectively.