Waste heat recovery systems can offer significant energy savings and substantial greenhouse gas emission reductions, with a market projected to exceed €45,0 billion by 2018.
The overall aim of the I-Therm EU project, started in 2015 and reaching its conclusion on december 2020, was to develop and demonstrate technologies and processes for efficient and cost effective heat recovery from industrial facilities in the temperature range 70°C to 1000°C and the optimum integration of these technologies with existing energy systems or electricity generated from recovering exceeding heat. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 680599.
Synesis participates to the project with the role of system integrator, focusing on aspects related to control and monitoring of the developed systems. In particular, we are involved in the development of the pilot installations of the Trilateral Flash System (TFC) for low (70°C to 200°C) temperature waste heat sources at the TATA STEEL UK industrial site and the Supercritical Carbon Dioxide System (sCO2) for temperatures above 200°C at the Brunel University London.
The control and monitoring system was developed adopting the IEC-61499 technology, a continuosly evolving standard which Synesis is supporting since its inception, collaborating with academic and industrial actors during several research projects and pilot implementations.
Due to the severe environmental conditions encountered in these industrial contexts, remote monitoring functionalities are considered an essential requirement, as they enable the continuous observation of the system behaviour and the possibility to catch, or even to predict, possible anomalies.
To this aim, Synesis developed a twofold system able to monitor driver-level signals, store them on a local database and forward them to a remote mirror, which is accessible by means of a web based graphical interface.
Such a decoupling of different subsystems helps in managing possible criticalities, due to the adversities of the industrial sites, on a side, and the latency and possible unavailability of internet connections, on the other side.