BFI VDEh-Betriebsforschungsinstitut GmbH

Initial situation:

Industries involve a huge amount of energy demand. A considerable amount of this energy is lost and escapes to ambient as waste heat. Due to commercial and strategic reasons energy recovery from industrial waste heat streams is getting more and more important. Main drivers are international competition and technological opportunities, combined with geopolitical issues such as security of energy supply, energy consumption and greenhouse gas emission. In recent years, numerous ideas have been suggested either for better process integration (systems analysis), reuse in other settings, or for power generation. One option for power generation from waste heat are thermoelectrical systems. However, the recovery of waste heat by Thermoelectric generators (TEG) is not known in industrial scale until now. Thus, the possibilities of thermoelectric power generation using industrial gaseous waste heat at temperatures above 550°C will be determined in this research project.

Working topics:

• Process and waste heat assessment.
• Design of a TE demonstrator and a bench scale unit.
• Heat exchanger design for safety and sustained performance.
• Design & construction of the test-bed and testing of the bench scale unit.
• Industrial testing of the demonstrator.
• Techno-economical evaluation.

Results:

• Long-term demonstration of waste heat recovery from high temperature waste gases of the iron & steel industry by a thermoelectrical system with a power 1 kWel.
• Optimisation of the heat transfer from the hot waste gases to the TEG.
• Optimisation of the efficiency and power output of the TE system.

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Funded by: 

Project duration:
01.07.2015 – 30.06.2019