Sweet success for GEA pentane heat pump

GERMANY: GEA has installed a new high-temperature heat pump using pentane refrigerant (R601) for a Belgian sugar producer.

The new GEA technology enables industrial waste heat to be brought to temperatures of 135ºC to 160°C to provide sustainable and energy efficient process.

Until now, industrial heat pumps with a medium output of 500kW to 10MW have mainly been limited to flow temperatures of around 95°C. 

The new GEA heat pump is enabling Tiense Suiker to decarbonise its the sugar production process and ensuring an annual reduction in CO₂ emissions of 3,000 to 3,500 tons per year.

In industrial sugar production, fossil fuel steam boilers are traditionally employed to obtain the sugar beet or sugar cane through extraction, evaporation and crystallisation. 

The GEA pentane heat pump, using a screw compressor, is now at the heart of the steam generation production process. The integrated technology uses vacuum steam with a temperature between 75°C and 92°C from the evaporation plant as a heat source to generate steam with a temperature of around 139°C and an output of 4MW.

The installation is part of the EU’s SPIRIT project focused on promoting the use of industrial heat pumps in the implementation of sustainable heat-upgrade technologies for industry.

SPIRIT is funded by the Horizon Europe Framework Programme, the EU’s research and innovation program that supports science and industry in developing sustainable and innovative solutions to global challenges.

GEA is working with partners from science and associations to implement the high-temperature heat pump at Tiense Suiker. These include the Danish Technological Institute (DTI), the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA) and TLK Energy GmbH (TLK) from Aachen, Germany, to provide software and support with system simulation. 

The official opening of the plant took place on Wednesday (February 19) in the presence of the Flemish prime minister Matthias Diependaele.

The Tiense Suiker application is one of three full-scale heat pump demonstration sites under the SPIRIT project. The other sites are a prawn processing site in in Finnsnes, Norway, using a Mayekawa ammonia/pentane cascade heat pump, and a paper and pulp facility in Morava, Czechia, using a 4-cylinder steam compressor supplied by Spilling Technologies.