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Sunset at the North Campus © Roland Baege​/​TU Dortmund
Invention sold

Efficient Use of Waste Heat in Industry

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A photo of a man with glasses in a suit. © Hesham Elsherif​/​TU Dortmund
Professor Andreas Brümmer has headed the Chair of Fluidics at TU Dortmund University since 2006.
Together with his team at the Chair of Fluidics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Professor Andreas Brümmer has developed a screw-spindle expressor that helps to reduce heat loss in industry. TU Dortmund University recently sold the rights to the invention, for which a patent application has been filed, to a French company.

Process heat, the energy required for technical processes, makes up around two-thirds of final energy consumption in German industry. At the same time, a large proportion of the waste heat generated in industrial processes is still released into the environment. To minimize these heat losses and make industry more sustainable and efficient, Professor Andreas Brümmer, head of the Chair of Fluidics, and his team have developed an optimized screw-spindle expressor.

The invention combines a screw-spindle expander, which converts thermal energy (heat) into mechanical energy when a gas expands, with a screw-spindle compressor, which in turn uses that mechanical energy directly to compress gas. The special design of the screw-spindle expressor, with its counter-rotating lobes at both rotors, makes it possible to control the resultant bearing forces effectively, even if there are significant pressure differences (e.g., when using transcritical carbon dioxide). This ensures wear-free and energy-efficient operation, for example in industrial-scale heat pumps.

Support from the CET

“The intelligent arrangement of the expander and the compressor in a single housing eliminates the problem of external seals, and low-temperature waste heat can be directly converted into high-temperature thermal (process) heat,” explains Professor Andreas Brümmer. With the assistance of the intellectual property advisors at the Center for Entrepreneurship & Transfer (CET) at TU Dortmund University, he has filed a patent application for the screw-spindle expressor. Together with PROvendis, the central service provider for the innovation2business.nrw network, TU Dortmund University recently sold the rights to the invention to Cixten, a French company that specializes in the recovery and conversion of low-temperature heat into useful energy. “For us, this development with its roots in scientific research is another important building block for upgrading our technologies and increasing energy efficiency and sustainability in industry,” explains Philippe Wagner, CTO and co-founder of Cixten.

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