Electricity and heat production covering household and industrial processes are the largest contributors to global emissions. A large part of this industry's carbon footprint comes from the evaporation of water during drying processes (thermal industry) where the heat is produced by burning fossil fuels. SoA solutions such as direct electrification, hydrogen and biogas do not save energy to a significant extent leading sometimes to increased energy demand and delivering negative ROIs. Furthermore, regulatory drivers and a Net-Zero scenario will push the end-user needs to transition to cleaner sources. Industries including drying processes are bakeries and laundries which represent the general pain of the thermal industry: There is a need to convert to sustainable drying, and the solutions are not available.
The CircleDRY Consortium will design, develop and validate for the first time, the optimisation of Ultra-High Temperature Heat Pumps (UHT-HP) and Heat Exchanger Circular Energy Unit (CEU) leading to a final integration process intended to overcome the industrial drying process inefficiency. We will demonstrate our technology through prior lab testing (TRL5), to subsequently proceed in a real industrial context (TRL7). Essential parameters for lean commercialisation will be validated such as energy savings (50-80%), water savings (90%), process impurities removal and downtime avoidance. CircleDRY results will benchmark an efficient approach allowing the sector electrification to lower EU’s Industry CFP and Operator's OpEx.
The PES impact for ENERIN as the project Norwegian actor will entail new know-how on the optimisation and integration of Ultra High-Temperature heat Pumps on circular energy systems from the Danish partner Circular Energy Sytems supporting Norwegian and European Industry decarbonisation.