RECYCLING INDUSTRIAL WASTE HEAT THROUGH THE APPLICATION OF THERMOPHOTOVOLTAIC AND THERMOELECTRIC: A NOVEL HYBRID TECHNOLOGY FOR ELECTRICITY GENERATION

Energy intensive high temperature processing industries lost more than 50% of their energy as waste heat during the production, which accounts for 200 TWh of power each year in Europe. There are many technologies available for converting waste heat into electricity but at industry scale the adaptation of these solutions is scarce. Specific barriers such as efficiency and cost of these renewable technologies and difficulty in integrating these systems in the production lines limit their extensive adoption as heat recovery technologies in the industry. Innovative approaches to improve the efficiency with new modular technology are therefore urgently required that can be retrofitted in production lines to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emission. The primary goal of INFERNO is to develop a new hybrid platform system based on the integration of thermophotovoltaics (TPV), metasurface collector (MetaS) and thermoelectric generators (TEG), which will eventually contribute to a breakthrough in sustainable energy harvesting from industrial waste heat. We will develop new infrared sensitive low bandgap (<0.7 eV) TPV cell with integrated plasmonic metamaterials to increase the photon adsorption to improve the overall heat-to-electricity conversion efficiency to 25% and high performance TEG devices made of earth-abundant materials with an efficiency of 10%. With an innovative design strategy, all these components will be integrated to develop a modular, hybrid energy harvesting system that can be easily integrated in the production lines for converting waste heat into usable electricity. To accomplish the project's ultimate goal, expertise in materials research, modelling, cell fabrication, thermoelectricity, and electronics is merged in a pan-European scale. The integrated hybrid system and its components (TPV, MetaS, TEG) invented by INFERNO will be tested in 3 pilot demonstrations in 3 countries to convert waste heat into electricity to reduce greenhouse gas emission.