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RENEWABLE ENERGY COOLING SYSTEMS BASED ON PHASE CHANGE TECHNOLOGY

Project description

Efficient cooling technology reduces wind turbine costs and extends their lifetime

Key components in wind turbines need to be cooled as they heat up during operation. Despite recent improvements in wind turbine technology, current cooling systems demonstrate a number of disadvantages. For example, they consist of many components, which reduces reliability, increases maintenance costs and limits their lifetime. Furthermore, they are energy intensive, consuming around 1 % of the energy produced. With the help of the EU-funded DESIRE project, Spain-based company Alaz Arima is developing efficient, simplified cooling technology based on thermosyphons that addresses all these issues. Alaz Arima cooling solutions can also be applied to solar PV plants, for example, to cool down power electronics of inverters.

Objective

ALAZ ARIMA S.L. is a company specialized in the design, development, manufacture and commercialization of two-phase thermosyphons based technology cooling systems, applicable to wind turbines components and to other sectors, such as photovoltaics. Through DESIRE, the company has developed a breakthrough cooling solution for wind turbines whose technical viability has already been validated through different developments and testing activities.
Even with recent improvements in wind turbines technology, there is a need for more efficient cooling systems in order to reduce operating and maintenance costs and to optimize the performance of wind farms. Current cooling systems are complex and formed by many components (motor pumps, fans, etc.) which: increase the cost (expensive components); limit the life of the complete system to less than 20 years; increase maintenance expenses (thousands of euros during the useful life); consume energy (up to several tents of kW, approx. 1% of the produced energy) and need big room generating high noise.
The new technology developed by ALAZ will allow to remove certain components of the current cooling solutions, simplifying it and leading to reducing system associated costs, increasing the useful life, reducing maintenance costs, reducing energy consumption and reducing space needs and noise. Currently, ALAZ is working in the assembly and validation of the first prototypes. The support of the SME Instrument Phase 1 will help consolidating ALAZ’s activity and reaching the market by 2019 as well as new clients and sectors as soon as possible, increasing exponentially the sales and staff.

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) H2020-SMEInst-2016-2017

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Coordinator

ALAZ ARIMA SL
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 50 000,00
Address
CL CANADA REAL, 14
31195 BERRIOPLANO
Spain

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SME

The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.

Yes
Region
Noreste Comunidad Foral de Navarra Navarra
Activity type
Private for-profit entities (excluding Higher or Secondary Education Establishments)
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 71 429,00
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