Industry is responsible for a large share of Europe's energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions, and much of that energy goes into heat. Many industrial heating processes still rely on burning fossil fuels or on heating intermediate fluids such as thermal oil or water, which is inefficient and hard to decarbonise. Replacing these systems with clean, electric heating is one of the most direct ways to cut industrial emissions and reduce Europe's dependence on imported fuels, in line with the European Green Deal, the Fit for 55 package and REPowerEU.
JOULIA addresses this challenge by designing, building and demonstrating two highly efficient electric heating technologies for medium-to-high temperature processes (100–500 °C): induction heating and microwave heating. Instead of heating a fluid that then transfers heat to the product, both technologies deliver energy directly to the material, removing intermediate circuits and increasing efficiency.
The technologies are demonstrated in two real industrial settings in the rubber and plastics sector: the continuous vulcanisation of rubber flooring, where a gas- and thermal-oil-heated machine is retrofitted with an induction system; and the production of multilayer insulation pipes, where a water-and-electric-resistance gluing process is replaced by direct microwave heating. JOULIA also develops digital tools to make these processes flexible (able to follow the availability of renewable electricity), reliable (through predictive maintenance) and measurable (through life-cycle environmental and economic assessment).
The project's pathway to impact is to prove these solutions at an industrially relevant scale (Technology Readiness Level 7) and then assess their replication potential across the rubber and plastics, food and ceramics sectors. If widely adopted, the expected benefits include reduced fossil-fuel consumption, higher energy efficiency, lower greenhouse-gas emissions and greater integration of renewable energy in industry.
