€10.5m investment in Joule process heat pump

AUSTRIA: Ecop, the Austrian developer of a highly efficient, single-stage rotation industrial heat pump has secured €10.5m investment to expand its production capacities.

The round is led by global pump and valve manufacturer KSB, acquiring an interest of almost 20%, and co-invested by the European Innovation Council Fund (EICF). The investment enables KSB to secure access to the rapidly growing market for large heat pumps for thermal outputs of between 500kW and 10MW.

Further investments come from InnoEnergy, New Energy Technologies, Finadvice and almost all existing investors. 

The single-stage rotation heat pump developed by Ecop is based on a left-hand Joule process in which there is no phase transition of the working medium.

It can achieve a very high temperature lift and, thanks to the use of a gaseous mixture as the working fluid and rotation technology, the heat pump can be used efficiently in a very wide and flexible temperature range.

Although this process is already about 150 years old, it could not be used in heat pumps until now because of the high compression required. Ecop overcomes this by centrifugal force. The working gas of the rotation heat pump circulates in a closed circuit rotating around an axis. If heat exchangers are now positioned close to and further away from the axis of rotation and these are connected to pipes, a thermodynamic cycle is built up. 

Since the centrifugal force during rotation increases with increasing distance from the axis of rotation, the working gas is also increasingly compressed by the centrifugal force. 

To operate the cycle, the working gas must circulate in a closed circuit by means of a fan. The increase in pressure in the area far from the axis causes an increase in the temperature of the working gas, which releases heat into a sink via a heat exchanger. 

When the cooled gas is expanded again, it changes its temperature to a lower level due to the flow against the centrifugal force and can thus absorb heat again at the source via the heat exchanger near the axle. 

Depending on the speed of rotation, there is a different pressure ratio between the outer and inner zone. That way, the compression and expansion pressure ratio can be changed. This results in a freely definable temperature difference between the low-pressure side (source) and high-pressure side (sink), which can be regulated via the rotational speed. Through the rotational speed of the fan, the flow rate and hence the transferrable heating capacity are regulated independently of the temperature increase. Hence, this technology facilitates maximum flexibility.

By combining several modules, the performance of the rotation heat pump can be multiplied. With the help of diffusion bonding technology, rotor modules (or cores) with an output of 700kW are created. Ecop’s technology allows several of the cores to be combined to create larger outputs. For example, eight cores can be combined in one machine to increase the output to 5.6MW.