Zurich/Buchs SG – Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the OST – Ostschweizer Fachhochschule have discovered how industrial heat pumps can flexibly generate different temperatures of up to 200 degrees. The process is based on a refrigerant mixture.
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) and the OST - Ostschweizer Fachhochschule in Buchs have developed an approach that allows industrial heat pumps to flexibly generate heat at different temperatures of up to 200 degrees. Conventional heat pumps in industrial processes are usually designed for a specific application and the associated temperature, explains the ETH in a corresponding press release. Switching to another application is expensive and inconvenient. The new approach of the researchers at the two universities has therefore already aroused great interest among Swiss and international companies.
The temperature that can be reached by a heat pump and the associated temperature curve depend mainly on the refrigerant used. All other components of the heat pump are therefore designed for the respective refrigerant. In contrast, a mixture is used in the process developed by the researchers. Depending on the mixing ratio, different temperature curves can be generated for industrial processes.
To find the optimum refrigerant mixture, the researchers used a computer model to simulate combinations of over 200 million known synthetic molecules. The optimum mixture consisting of two components was then successfully tested in OST's heat pump laboratory. "We were able to prove that our mixture increases the efficiency of an industrial heat pump available on the market by up to 25 percent, as predicted," the head of the heat pump laboratory, Stefan Bertsch, is quoted as saying in the press release. ce/hs