The main objective of the project is to develop solutions to recover the waste heat produced in energetic intensive processes of industrial sectors such as cement, glass, steelmaking and petrochemical and transform it into useful energy. These solutions will be designed after an evaluation of the energetic situation of these four industries and will deal with the development of Waste Heat Recovery Systems (WHRS) based on the Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) technology. This technology is able to recover and transform the thermal energy of the flue gases of EII into electric power for internal or external use. Furthermore, a WHRS will be developed and tested to recover and transform the thermal energy of the flue gases of EII into mechanical energy for internal use (compressors). In order to reach this objective several challenging innovative aspects will have to be approached by the consortium. It is planned to design and develop a multisectorial direct heat exchanger to transfer heat directly from the flue gases to the organic fluid of the ORC system and to develop new heat conductor and anticorrosive materials to be used in parts of the heat exchanger in contact with the flue gases. These aspects will be completed by the design and modelling of a new integrated monitoring and control system for the addressed sectors. The consortium consists of 8 partners from 4 European countries. They cover several relevant sectors of the energy intensive industry, namely cement, steel, glass and petrochemical sectors. The industrial involvement in the project is significant and the project addresses the implementation of a full demonstration of the WHRS for electrical energy generation in one of the industrial partners (CEMENTI ROSSI) and a semi-validation of the WHRS for air compressors energy supply system at pilot scale.

EAF steelmaking is the key technology for decarbonised steelmaking, either in scrap-based plant by modification of existing processes for further decarbonisation, or as new EAF installations in decarbonised integrated steel works to (partly) replace the classical BF-BOF production. At same time the EAF is the most important example for modular and hybrid heating, already now combining electric arc heating with burner technologies. Consequently, it was selected as main focus of GreenHeatEAF for the Call „Modular and hybrid heating technologies in steel production“. GreenHeatEAF develops and demonstrates the most important decarbonisation approaches at EAFs including the use of hydrogen to replace natural gas combustion in existing or re-vamped burners or innovative technologies like CoJet. Furthermore, decarbonisation of EAF steelmaking by solid materials like DRI/HBI and renewable carbon sources like biochar is tackled. Technologies to re-optimise the heating management with maximum heat recovery of off-gas and slag employing new sensor and soft-sensor concepts as well as extended digital twins are developed: as result the extended CFD and flowsheeting models, and monitoring and control tools will prognose the influences of the different decarbonisation measures on EAF and process chain to support upcoming decarbonisation investments and to enable the control of decarbonised hybrid heating with maximum energy efficiency. GreenHeatEAF combines trials in demonstration scale, e.g. in combustion- and EAF-demo plants, with validations in industrial scale and digital optimisations with high synergy. Thus, it completely follows the Horizon Twin Transition and Clean Steel Partnership objectives and the target to progress decarbonisation technologies from TRL 5 to 7. This synergic concept of GreenHeatEAF supports implementation and digitisation to speed up the transition of the European steel industry to highly competitive energy-efficient decarbonised steel productio

The EU has started a progressive decarbonisation with the aim to become carbon neutral by 2050. Energy Intensive Industries (EII) are expected to play an important role in this transition as they represent 24% of the final energy consumption, but a clear long-term vision and strategy is required in order to remain competitive while contributing to the decarbonization targets of the EU. RE4Industry has been conceived under this framework with a twofold objective: to support EII in the identification and integration of renewable energy (RE) solutions together with the definition of Action Plans for decarbonisation, and to transform the EU industrial landscape into a large market niche for the uptake of RE while defining the appropriate framework conditions for short- and long-term scenarios. To this end, RE4Industry will set up and empower a comprehensive network of stakeholders and market actors who will identify feasible RE technologies and their market barriers and will interact with industry representatives to gather their needs, expectations, drivers and barriers towards the implementation of these technologies. Such an approach will be accomplished through a strong engagement strategy and the creation of RE4Industry Collaborative Network, who will receive from the project partners knowledge transfer material such as success cases, best practices, policy recommendations and technological roadmaps for promoting RE adoption. In parallel to the networking activities, RE4Industry will develop a baseline methodology for the design of Action Plans for decarbonisation in EIIs that will be developed and validated together with 3 representative industrial use cases from the steel, aluminium and chemical sectors. RE4Industry solid replication strategy will enable the roll out of this methodology in at least 8 additional use cases of different sectors within the project lifespan and the initiation of cross-border knowledge transfer activities to a total of 12 EU countries.

The INEVITABLE Innovative Action aims to realize a fully digitalized monitoring technology for an optimized and improved performance of manufacturing processes. Use cases from the energy and resource intensive sectors steel and nonferrous metals are addressed, whereas the considered manufacturing sites are in Slovenia, Austria and Spain covering primary and secondary steelmaking and investment casting of nonferrous metal alloys. The focus of INEVITABLE is to develop high-level supervisory control systems for different production plants and on the demonstration in operational environment (TRL 7) to enable autonomous operation of the processes based on embedded cognitive reasoning. Key Performance Indicators will be defined related to resource consumption and product qualities. Based on that, a full digital transformation of the plants will be done including acquisition, storage, processing and analytics of data streams, furthermore, communication and automation, and finally, standardization of relevant data interfaces. Predictive models will be developed being combined with smart and networked sensor technologies to correlate process parameters with quality indicators of the manufactured products. The models will be tested in offline mode on the one hand, and in online mode on the other hand by means of comprehensive plant trials at the industrial partner sites. Dissemination activities will transfer the knowledge throughout the SPIRE sectors. The industrial partners are supported by scientific partners with excellent competences in the field of digitalization. INEVITABLE will improve the capabilities for reliable and real-time control logics of final product properties and process efficiency to increase the flexibility of plant operators. Improved and flexible production performance is expected with a simultaneous reduction of resource consumption and CO2 emissions contributing to a more competitive and sustainable metallurgic industry within the EU.

European process industries need to address resources, materials and environmental constrains by improving its flexibility and performance through cognition capabilities, as existing in human intelligence. Digitisation is the main enabler for such capabilities. CAPRI will develop, test and experiment an innovative Cognitive Automation Platform (CAP) for Process Industry Digital Transformation, enabled by cognitive tools that provide existing process industries flexibility of operation, improvement of performance across different indicators (KPIs) and state of the art quality control of its products and intermediate flows. The CAP encompasses methods and tools for governing six Digital Transformation pathways (6P, Product, Process, Platform, Performance, People, Partnership), a Reference Architecture with four levels of cognitive human-machine interaction (industrial IoT connections, smart events processing, knowledge data models and AI-based decision support), a set of reference implementations, both commercial and open source, for batch, continuous and hybrid process industry plants, and a toolbox of cognitive solutions for planning, operation, control and sensing. The CAP will be modular and scalable, so that advanced applications could be developed and integrated on top of it and its validation will take place addressing manufacturing challenges in industrial operational environments of three outstanding process sectors: asphalt (minerals), steelmaking, and pharma industry (chemical). CAPRI results could be applied to a wide range of problems and challenges in future cognitive plants. CAP Platform and the cognitive tools included in it can be replicable in areas of production planning, control, automated processes and operations of virtually all SPIRE sectors. A strong and experienced consortium of 7 EU companies and 6 RTOs will ensure maximum exploitation and replication of the systems developed.