Industry is the highest heat consuming sector, and its need for high temperature process heat is on the increase. However, 83% of industrial process heat is still supplied by inefficient and polluting fossil fuel boilers. The Highlift project will develop a next-generation high temperature heat pump (HTHP) based on an innovative 4-cylinder alpha configuration Stirling engine design. Highlift accepts low temperature (30´C) input water drawn from industrial waste heat recapture systems and use electrical energy to generate saturated steam at over 180´C. Such temperature lifts are not possible with any other HTHP today. The Highlift project optimises the industrial design via 1) increased system efficiency, 2) improved reliability, 3) 30% cut on production costs, 4) refined production quality control, and 5) improved Cloud-based operating system. We will pilot the near-market prototype at a single high-profile multinational industrial end user with high demands in terms of constant, intensive operation and high output temperature requirements. The project will simultaneously undertake a market maturation process including up- and downstream supply chain development, in-depth target market analyses, and validation of the business and commercialisation strategy. This will bring the HighLift technology to full commercial readiness at the end of the project. Over 25,000 hours of tests with industry since 2012 have shown that it is feasible to use Highlift to generate hot industrial process steam in an economic and environmentally sustainable way. Highlift reduces energy consumption to supply high temperature process heat by 50-70% and will cut industrial CO2 emissions when producing high temperature steam by 70-96%. Our planned commercial roll-out of 174 Highlift heat pumps by 2025 will save our customers a total of €134.2m, and reduce up to 65,600 tons of CO2 (eq) emissions.

This Action will contribute to the sustainable development of European chemical industries in the coming decades by delivering an ambitious doctoral training programme that draws on expertise from industry and academia across 4 European countries. The research agenda and experiential training will grow the skills base beyond approaches that have relied upon a limited set of molecular scaffolds and a relatively small sub-set of reactions to exploit new reaction paradigms and platforms (e.g. high throughput experimentation, photoredox & electrochemistry) that meet the needs of modern drug discovery science.