The conference has been held from the 19th to the 21st September in Brussels and brings together relevant players from the European process industry as well as the various R&D projects implemented under the SPIRE platform (Sustainable Process Industry through Resource and Energy Efficiency).
The “Process Industry Conference” 2017 aims to draw the future of the European Process Industry in the fields of resource innovation and energy efficiency. It brings together relevant actors of the industry and allows to carry out a pooling of the projects that are part of SPIRE public-private framework which has as main challenges to reduce the use of fossil fuels, to encourage the recovery of recycled raw materials and to reduce CO2 emissions.
IK4-AZTERLAN takes part in this conference presenting the projects SusPIRE and RESLAG in which the Metallurgical Research Center participates together with other relevant agents.
The project SusPIRE seeks to reuse the surplus heat energy from the investment casting process for super-alloy aeronautical components, used in the production of engines from the world’s leading aircraft manufacturers. To this end, SusPIRE addresses aspects such as the use of more efficient systems to collect the energy from waste streams, based on the use of Phase Change Materials (PCM), and foresees the development of heat transfer liquids with improved pickup and transmission properties, which in turn do not suffer major degradations during use. SusPIRE is carried out with the Basque companies PRECICAST BILBAO S.A., TELUR Geotermia y Agua S.A., and the technology centers IK4-AZTERLAN and IK4-TEKNIKER.
Fernando Santos, IK4-Azterlan researcher presnets SusPIRE proyect.
On the other side, the project RESLAG seeks to value black slags from the steel manufacturing processes by four different working lines: as a raw material for the recovery of metals, as a thermal storage medium to capture wasted heat, as thermal storage material to extend the electrical production in thermosolar power plants and as a resource to produce refractory materials. In this case, IK4-AZTERLAN cooperates with CIC ENERGIGUNE, ARCELOR MITTAL, NOVARGI, HASTEN Ventures, DLR (Germany), ETH Zürich (Switzerland), the IMPERIAL COLLEGE of London (UK), FRIEDRICH-ALEXANDER Universität (Germany), CEA (France), OPTIMUM CEMENT (France), ENEA (Italy), VTT (Finland), GE Group (France), GE Group (Switzerland), LIFE CYCLE ENGINEERING (Italy), FRAUNHOFER (Germany) and RENOTECH (Finland).
Both the RESLAG project and the SusPIRE project are funded by the Horizon 2020 program and have been developed within the collaboration framework offered by SPIRE.
European policies in recent years have set as strategic objective a 20% reduction on energy consumption in industrial processes by those companies considered as major consumers. A big part of the Basque industry network (framed in iron, steel, foundry, forging, hot stamping or heat treatment sectors, among many others) belongs to this group.
