Location: QLD
Application: Industrial | Mining
Product: 2x Coilflo® Heat Exchangers
The project demonstrates how thermal energy can be recovered directly from wastewater to provide sustainable heating and cooling without relying on natural gas. At the heart of the system is a Dimpleflo® heat exchanger, which transfers thermal energy from wastewater to a water-sourced heat pump, allowing the depot’s lunchroom to be heated and cooled using energy that would otherwise be lost.
While recovering heat from wastewater isn’t a new concept, making it reliable over the long term has always been the engineering challenge. That’s where Dimpleflo® makes the difference.
Wastewater is an excellent source of renewable thermal energy, maintaining a relatively stable temperature throughout the year. However, it also contains suspended solids, fibrous material, grit and biological matter that rapidly foul conventional heat exchangers.
As fouling builds on the heat transfer surface, heat transfer efficiency declines, pressure losses increase and maintenance requirements become more frequent. For many wastewater heat recovery systems, this has traditionally been the limiting factor.
For projects like Barwon Water’s, long-term reliability is just as important as thermal performance.
Dimpleflo® was specifically engineered for applications where conventional smooth tubes struggle.
Instead of a plain tube surface, Dimpleflo® features a patented dimpled tube geometry that increases turbulence and wall shear stress along the tube wall. The increased turbulence helps prevent solids and biofilm from settling on the heat transfer surface, allowing the exchanger to maintain performance for longer while reducing fouling and cleaning requirements.
Unlike plate heat exchangers, Dimpleflo® also features a large single flow path capable of handling wastewater and other high-solids fluids without narrow passages that are prone to blockage.
These characteristics make Dimpleflo® ideally suited to wastewater heat recovery, sludge heating and other demanding industrial applications where dependable operation is essential.
Although the Breakwater project represents an exciting milestone for wastewater heat recovery in Australia, the technology itself builds on decades of proven Dimpleflo® performance.
Teralba has long supplied Dimpleflo® heat exchangers for industrial wastewater heat recovery, sludge heating and digestate applications where fouling resistance and long-term reliability are critical to process performance.
The Breakwater project demonstrates how this proven technology can now be applied on a broader scale, helping utilities recover valuable thermal energy while reducing emissions and dependence on traditional heating systems.
Barwon Asset Solutions’ Heat-as-a-Service project demonstrates the growing opportunity to recover renewable energy from wastewater infrastructure.
As more organisations investigate wastewater heat recovery, selecting heat exchanger technology capable of operating reliably in high-fouling environments will be critical to the success of these systems.
Teralba is proud that Dimpleflo® has been selected to help power this innovative project and looks forward to supporting the continued growth of sustainable wastewater heat recovery across Australia.
Dimpleflo® is Teralba’s proprietary dimpled tube heat transfer technology, engineered to maintain performance in high-solids, high-fouling-risk fluids across wastewater, sludge, digestate and industrial process applications. For more information, contact Teralba at sales@teralba.com.
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