R&D PROJECTS

SEAL OF EXCELLENCE I IE-E

Acronym: Seal of excellence I IE-E

Project title: Innovative power generation machine for low temperature waste heat recovery

Project website: https://www.psyctotherm.gr/en/r-d-2/co-funded-research-projects-en/seal-of-excellence-i-ie-e.html

Time period: December 2019 to December 2021

Funder: Co-financed by Greece and EU, Program EPAnEK

Total budget: € 1,198,250.00

Partners:

  • G. LIGEROS & SIA OE

Short desription:

Large amounts of excess heat are currently wasted in various industrial processes, remaining unexploited. The Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) is the most efficient technology for waste heat recovery, while its usual operating range of the units that utilize the rejected energy is greater than 200 ⁰C, covering a wide range of applications in various sectors of the industry. However, there are limited products for low temperature applications (below 100 ⁰C), mainly due to low efficiency and high cost. The new IE-E product, which is being developed as part of the research project, aims to mitigate the existing gap of this market and to offer a new efficient and financially viable product for the conversion of low-temperature heat into power.

The market evaluation, which was carried out in a previous research project, showed that the most suitable and economically efficient market for importing the product is that of biogas. More specifically, the company will develop, design, test and evaluate an improved version of an ORC approaching the isothermal expansion, which will recover heat from the Internal Combustion Engine’s (ICE) cooling system of biogas plants, to produce additional electricity. The ORC system uses the heat of the exhaust gases, while the condensing thermal energy of the ORC is used for heating, as it can provide sufficient heat load for this purpose. A fraction of the heat from the cooling circuit of the machine is driven to the crucible to maintain fermentation, as shown in Figure.