What is the problem/issue being addressed?
More than 50% of all power generated in the World is lost to the environment as waste heat. Heat for frying, drying, sterilizing, cooking of pasteurizing is most of the time delivered by boilers burning fossil fuel.
Many such processes are operated 24/7, all year round. Heat generation constitutes a significant part of the overall production cost and adds to the industry’s negative environmental impact.
Heat pumps, recovering waste heat from a process and upgrading it to a higher temperature to make it usable again, are widely used in industry. Even if technical improvements have been lately observed, such heat pumps have until now not been able to efficiently deliver output temperatures above 140°C. It doesn't meet the requirements of many industrial processes e.g. deep-frying processes in the food manufacturing industry require temperatures approaching 200°C.
Duynie Group, a Dutch agritech company, has patented a high temperature heat pump design for waste heat recovery in deep frying processes, particularly for the production of French fries or potato chips. Tocircle’s proprietary compressor technology is the key equipment of this heat pump design.
Deep frying of potato is a first, well defined application which will be used within the present project to test Tocircle’s compressors in a real industrial environment, bringing the technology from TRL 6 to TRL 9 (Technology Readiness Level). There are however many other similar applications in the food industry, in the production of pharmaceutical products and chemistry, that can be addressed by this high temperature heat pump technology.
The issue being addressed is thus waste heat reconditioning in high temperature (160-190°C), heat intensive industrial production processes. Reconditioning meaning that the thermal energy contained in waste heat from the process is upgraded to the original temperature that the process requires.
Why is it important for society?
Increasing the energy efficiency of such continuous heat-intensive industrial processes allow reducing the energy cost involved and the impact on the environment. It has several positive consequences: potentially cheaper products for the consumer, lower carbon emissions, and finally better Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) image for the producer.
Achieving better use of the energy consumed in continuous industrial processes (often running at full power in excess of 8000 hours per year) has potentially a much higher lifecycle value than solar or wind energy, which only generate at full rating during a few thousand hours annually.
Potato frying in Europe requires alone 8TWh of energy per year and releases 1.5 million tons of CO2.
What are the overall objectives?
The primary technical objective of the “Hot Chips” project is to verify the performance of Tocircle’s controllable rotary vane compressors in real conditions, in a full-scale high temperature heat pump for waste heat recovery in industrial deep-frying.
The commercial objective is to deploy the technology in many production sites in Europe.
The main environmental objective is to considerably reduce the carbon footprint of industrial heat intensive high temperature production processes, replacing up to 70% of gas consumption by electrical energy (ideally from renewable sources). Moreover, the working medium used in the heat pump shall be environmentally friendly, having zero ODP and zero GWP.
