The VULKANO consortium met in Brussels last July 12-13th to kick-off the project. All partners introduced their companies to the EC Project Officer, highlighting their respective role in the project (BOSIO, FIVES STEIN, CSM, PCM Products, VALJI, TECNALIA, IEN, TORRECID, FRAUNHOFER, ASAŞ, CIDAUT and CIRCE as coordinator). It was also possible to have with us the Executive Director of SPIRE (Sustainable Process Industry through Resource and Energy Efficiency) Public Private Partnership.
This EC-funded project aims to provide solutions for a more efficient and sustainable European industry. In particular, the project’s efforts will be focused on Energy Intensive Industries as they are constantly facing challenges to enhance their process efficiency, reliability and flexibility. This is especially true for processes that involve industrial furnaces due to their high energy consumption rates.
20% increase in industrial furnace efficiency and 27% reduction of fossil fuels use
With these objectives in mind, the project will design, implement, integrate and validate five innovative strategies: improved refractory materials, phase change materials energy recovery, monitoring, in-house predictive tool and co-firing.
CIDAUT will be specially focused to the co-firing strategy that will partially replace natural gas by alternative or renewable energy sources. To do so, new or retrofitted burners will be developed to run on syngas obtained from biomass or other off-gases recovered from the process.