Forthcoming Research and Industry for European and National Development of SHIP

Forthcoming Research and Industry for European and National Development of SHIP

Solar heat is already used for Agro-Food industrial processes, mainly under 120°C. The FRIENDSHIP project will aim to demonstrate that solar heat can also be a reliable, user-friendly, high quality and cost-effective resource to meet the heat requirements for other industrial sectors as Textile, Plastics, Wood, Metal and Chemistry. To this end, the project plans to bring together research centres, industry leaders, technologies & heat suppliers into the same consortium in order to unite skills towards the boost and control of the heat supply temperature according to processes needs.Different coupling of technological and control innovations will be investigated: optimization of heat transfer coefficients; coupling and reliability of different solar technologies; introduction of high-temperature heat pumps; combined heat storage bringing flexibility on both solar and process loops with guarantees of continuous operation as well as plug-and-play integration; thermal chillers for cooling demand; and smart control to ease operation of the overall installation according to the process specifications. The proposed systems will be able to supply together heat at temperature up to 300°C and negative cold at temperature down to -40°C. In order to guarantee the replicability and scalability of the proposed demonstration, specific work will be carried out with world-class industries involved in the consortium (regulatory studies, financial incentive schemes, local energy markets creation), especially turned towards relevant users cases: industrial sites and parks in European countries where solar heat is currently underused.Ultimately, the project will evaluate to what extent high share of solar heat heating and cooling will allow to reduce the dependence of industrial processes on carbon energies and associated polluting emissions, and to quantify economic gains related to the use of solar energy in a context of a changing fossil fuel market and changing climatic constraints.