New research facility commissioned : Date:
On 30 January, Georg Simon Ohm Institute of Technology in Nuremberg (NIT) opened a new research facility which it will use to convert the waste heat from a sewage treatment plant to generate electricity. Dr Peter Pluschke, environmental officer of the city of Nuremberg and first plant manager of Stadtentwässerung und Umweltanalytik Nürnberg (SUN), was also on hand for the facility’s commissioning ceremony.
The research facility was constructed at a SUN sewage treatment plant which is cooperating with Nuremberg Institute of Technology on the project and which has committed itself to operating its plants in the most environmentally friendly way possible. For this reason, the sewage treatment plant has already been converting the daily sewage gas into electricity by means of four combined heat and power plants for several years. However, the power plants generate excess heat which, to date, blew out without being used.
Using this heat, the NIT research facility now drives a micro-steam turbine that generates additional electricity, thus improving the overall efficiency of the facility. These types of additional recycling techniques are referred to as “bottoming cycle” or, in this case, also “Clausius Rankine Cycle” (CRC) and are already in use at large power plants. For smaller facilities, however, CRC processes were not practiceable due to their technical complexity and high costs.
The goal of the micro-steam turbine project is to close this gap and to show that recycling waste heat can also work in smaller decentralised combined heat and power plants. Small power plants like these play an increasingly important role in the energy supply. The core of the testing facility is a hermetically sealed micro-steam turbine with a 40-kilowatt electric output, which is supposed to run in test mode for three years to demonstrate the practical application of the facility.
A total of 108 guests attended the commissioning ceremony on 30 January, including representatives from industry, associations and municipalities. At the inauguration ceremony, they were able to view the plant, and the Competence Centre for Energy Engineering of Nuremberg Institute of Technology also presented several other projects.
The micro-steam turbine was financed using funds from the BMBF as part of the “Clausius Rankine Cycle Testing Facility” project, which was supported with nearly 663,000 euros within the framework of the Research at Universities of Applied Sciences programme (FH-Invest funding line).