Industrial Scale System

About Industrial Scale system

The Qpinch industrial scale testing facility, also known as the Qpinch Lighthouse, is a thermochemical heat transformer with a capacity of 1 MW. Since completing the construction and commissioning phases respectively in 2020 and 2021, this unit has been put into service successfully to showcase its working principle both to external (e.g. clients) and internal stakeholders. As this unit is not integrated in an industrial customer site, the installation uses steam from a gas boiler to simulate waste heat of variable pressures. This waste heat is transformed internally, using phosphoric acid, to process heat at higher temperatures relevant to be used in different industrial sectors. The operational cost of the technology is extremely low, as the Qpinch process is solely driven by waste heat and only uses electrical energy to circulate the liquids.

The current commercial Qpinch plants, incl. the Lighthouse, were designed for waste heat temperatures starting at 100°C and above. The challenge to be faced in the PUSH2HEAT project is to transform waste heat at lower temperatures in an efficient way to process heat. More specifically the focus lies on waste heat temperatures of 75°C-100°C.

A second challenge is to push the electrical consumption of the Qpinch technology even more down to further reduce the costs of running the technology. To make this possible Qpinch already realized a significant decrease in electrical consumption during the first year of the project. By using variable frequency driven motors the heat-to-power ratio (QCOP/QpinchCOP) was increased from 15-20 to 25 and above.