Electrifying industry with flexible heat pumps

Whether for the production of food, medicines, metals or for surface finishing: Industry needs process heat. Companies continue to generate a large proportion of this using fossil fuels. Industry could already generate process heat up to 200 degrees Celsius in an environmentally friendly way using industrial heat pumps. But this is still a rarity. The reason: existing models are usually expensive custom-made products that are optimized for exactly one application. If a company has several processes with different heat requirements, separate solutions would be necessary.

Researchers at ETH Zurich and the University of Applied Sciences of Eastern Switzerland in Buchs have now found a way for heat pumps to generate heat more flexibly. While a refrigerant is evaporated and compressed in conventional heat pumps, this solution uses a refrigerant mixture that generates different temperature curves depending on its composition. This means that companies no longer have to redesign the entire heat pump if they need a different temperature, but simply adjust the mixture. This is much cheaper and simpler.