HyCool Participated at SP2020

On Thursday 29th October, at the virtual Sustainable Places 2020 (SP2020) conference, Prof. Dr. Uli Jakob, from project partner Dr. Jakob Energy Research; presented HyCool at the “Renewable Heating and Cooling Solutions for Buildings and Industry Workshop”.

During this online encounter, a selection of fifteen H2020 EU-funded projects gathered experts from the biomass, geothermal, solar thermal and heat pump sectors to explore a shared strategy to expand the use of renewable energy technology for building and industrial heating and cooling processes.

These technologies offer efficient and increasingly cost-competitive solutions to energy consumption.

Figure 1. Banner for “Renewable Heating and Cooling Solutions for Buildings and Industry Workshop” at SP2020.

In the course of the workshop, the projects were grouped into four categories according to their focus: (1) RHC for industrial applications; (2) storage solutions for RHC building support; (3) innovative solutions for RHC building deployment; (4) demonstration actions for RHC in buildings.

HyCool’s Presentation

Within the first cluster reviewing Renewable Heating and Cooling (RHC) for industries, Dr. Jakob offered a view of HyCool’s mission to increase the use of solar heat in industrial processes. For instance, HyCool’s solution combines solar collectors with adsorption chillers, that use solar energy to produce steam, heating, and cooling energy with greater efficiency.

Figure 2. Slide from Dr. Jakob’s presentation at SP2020.

Furthermore, Dr. Jakob’s shared the key equipment composing HyCool’s innovation and how it will be tested on the two pilot sites where HyCool will use the latest available developments in both concentrated solar panels and thermal storage fields to develop two innovative hybrid solar system concepts: one for chemical industrial processes primarily meant for solar steam and cooling energy provision and one for the small food industry primarily meant for solar cooling production.

Figure 3. Slide from Dr. Jakob’s presentation at SP2020.

In addition, Dr. Jakob showed how the HyCool’s Pre-feasibility Simulator can enable users to evaluate whether or not HyCool’s technology is suitable for a given industrial cooling process.

More About the Workshop

In conclusion, to further support the increase in the share of renewable energy across the EU, the production and validation of RHC solutions are of primary importance. The numerous fields of application in which innovative RHC technologies are proposed and currently investigated to demonstrate the relevance of this subject. Their performance and reliability must be demonstrated in order to achieve large distribution, because one of the key obstacles is the reluctance of industrial firms to implement new technologies, which can cause problems in production processes.

What seems necessary is to continue and improve cooperation between EU partners in order to take advantage of the expertise gained and to explore the social obstacles to the implementation of these solutions.

Learn about this workshop’s participating projectSWS-Heating – HYBUILD – CREATE – TRI-HP – GEOFIT – SHIP2FAIR – SUNHORIZON – Heat4Cool – GEOFIT – SCORES – Innova microSolar – Hybrid BioVGE – RES4BUILD – SolBioRev – FRIENDSHIP

Chair of the workshop: Andrea Frazzica (CNR ITAE) – partner of GEOFIT

Participating European Commission representatives: Olga RIO-SUAREZ, Policy Officer, DG Research & Innovation; and Eleftherios Bourdakis, Policy Officer, DG Research & Innovation.

Sources

Link to Proceedings: Renewable Heating and Cooling Solutions for Buildings and Industry

New Pre-Feasibility Assessment Tool

The HyCool project launches the HyCool Pre-feasibility Simulator

The HyCool project is ramping up the development of the exciting “HyCool Toolset” that couples innovative concentrated solar thermal collectors with novel hybrid-heat pumps to achieve a wider temperature output range of renewable heating & cooling for any industrial environment or process which may need cooling.

To demonstrate the solar refrigeration concept underpinning the “HyCool Toolset”, a “pre-feasibility simulator” or PFS has been released on the project’s website (https://hycool-project.eu/prefeasibility/). The HyCool PFS in seconds tells users how well this HyCool solar refrigeration concept fits to any given industrial cooling process.

The HyCool PFS is conceived for any user interested in deploying renewable energy into an industrial process. The inputs asked for the simulation are about the process and the estimated temperature:

  • Industrial process & internal temperature – only the required cooling temperature, the electricity price and the amount of full-load operation hours of the process are needed.
  • Estimated solar irradiation and external temperature – an irradiation map is provided; you’ll determine the yearly average Direct Normal Irradiation at the industrial site being simulated. Furthermore, you will need the average external temperature, which can be easily found on the web.

Once you have input the above data into the PFS, you will be able to evaluate the suitability of solar refrigeration for your industrial process in just a couple of seconds. If your industrial cooling process turns out to be feasible, you can contact the HyCool team via the project website and refer to your PFS-ID. You must know the tool only provides a very rough evaluation and is not meant for commercial use.

Users receive a free, private dataset that fully complies with GDPR and is first shown on-screen and subsequently auto-emailed to you. Results are concise, and scores range from 0 to 40 with 0 meaning no suitability and 40 being perfectly suitabile.

With little or no understanding of solar thermal energy and heat pump technology, and very little data about the process being simulated, the HyCool PFS offers the public a glimpse of Industry 4.0 with high efficiency, energy flexibility to reduce consumption, and a high penetration of renewables for industry.

The business cases are currently being piloted across Europe for the market-ready hardware to enter commercialisation planning phase by 2020. HyCool encourages you to test the PFS today!

Try our HyCool pre-feasibility simulator here.

Contact us!