MI #7

INNOVATION CHALLENGE 7:

AFFORDABLE HEATING AND COOLING OF BUILDINGS

Mission Innovation is a global initiative catalysing a decade of action and investment in research, development and demonstration to make clean energy affordable, attractive and accessible for all. This will accelerate progress towards the Paris Agreement goals and pathways to net zero.

Globally, buildings account for almost a third of final energy consumption, with space heating and cooling, and the provision of hot water, accounting for approximately half of this consumption. The ultimate goal of the affordable heating and cooling of buildings Innovation Challenge is to develop core building heating and cooling systems and measures to improve building envelopes that deliver affordable heating and cooling without the carbon emissions.

Sorption Heat Pump Systems Research Partners
Project Updates Deliverables Contact Us

Sorption Heat Pump Systems

Our aim is to investigate and develop low cost heat-powered heat pumps based on sorption technology. The MI#7 Technology Assessment Document (TAD) expert report on sorption heat pumps identified 10 Action Areas. Here, three of them are addressed: Ammonia-salt resorption domestic heat pump, Novel cycles for cooling, and Heat transformer based on ammonia-salt resorption.

The technical challenges relate to development of low-cost compact reactor / heat exchangers (sorption reactors) in which ammonia refrigerant is rapidly adsorbed or desorbed by chemical salts with heat output or input respectively. Our objectives are both:
a) Fundamental: understanding / characterising reaction equilibrium and kinetics, material stability, corrosion;
b) Applied: optimising, designing, constructing and laboratory testing of an ammonia-salt heat pump using the developed reactors.

These outputs will enable us to investigate how these new heating and cooling technologies can be implemented, identify what potential savings can be achieved, the approach required to deliver them, and to identify potential routes to implementation and policy implications.

Research partners

CNR-ICCOM (IT)

The National Research Council (CNR) is the main Italian public research organisation. ICCOM is the unit of the Institute of Chemistry of Organometallic Compounds. Research activities there are mainly focused on the development of materials, processes, analytical and computational methods for applications in fields such as materials chemistry, renewable energy, green-chemistry/environment, and health.
They will contribute with the characterization of ammonia adsorption into salt mixtures, including the verification of any degradation process due to aging.

CNR-ITAE (IT)

The National Research Council (CNR) is the main Italian public research organisation. ITAE has long proven experience in environmentally friendly production, storage and use of energy. It contributes to the development of technologies related to Energy Saving, low polluting energy production, Renewable Energy Sources, Hydrogen and Fuel Cells within Italy and Europe. In heat driven adsorption storage systems, its research activity covers the different levels of development of the adsorption unit, in particular: preparation and characterisation of new adsorbent materials and their integration with the heat exchanger, plus simulation of adsorption systems.
They will use their modelling expertise to explore alternative applications of the technology to higher temperatures (for use in industry) and storage as well as simulating and optimising different reactor designs.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CN)

The Institute of Refrigeration and Cryogenics in SJTU began research on solid sorption technology at the beginning of 1990s and is internationally recognised as a centre of excellence.
They have previous experience with ammonia salt systems and combatting long-term cycling degradation. In the project, they will contribute to the design of a heat pump prototype and when the material equilibrium and dynamic properties are characterised they will use them to simulate the realistic machine performance that can be expected of a number of advanced 3-bed cycles they have previously put forward as idealised concepts and will build a 3-salt prototype by 2022.

Simon Fraiser University (CA)

The Laboratory of Alternative Energy Conversion (LAEC) in SFU is internationally-renowned for thermofluids research and is equipped with state-of-the-art sorption testing and material characterization facilities. They are experts in sorption air conditioning, thermal storage, and transport phenomena in micro-structured materials.
Their experience in the chemistry of binders and matrices for adsorbent materials will assist in developing a long-lasting composite sorbent material for the system to be built. They are also working on graphite heat exchangers for sorption reactors and have developed and validated an analytical model that can be used for the design and optimization. This will assist with the design of prototype reactors which may be manufactured at SFU.

University of Warwick (UK)

The Sustainable Thermal Energy Technologies (STET) group in the School of Engineering is a research group leading efforts to decarbonise the energy networks by developing a range of low carbon heating an cooling technologies.
The UW technical activities are:
- Large Temperature Jump (LTJ) tests using candidate composite adsorbents to characterise their equilibrium and dynamic properties for system simulation
- Long term cycling tests facilities that can be used extensively to investigate and ensure sorbent durability
- System simulation, optimisation and design
- Building and commissioning kW scale 2-bed sorption heat pump for testing
- Modelling a high efficiency 3-salt cascaded system

Project updates

Workshop - July 2022

Mr. George Atkinson

University of Warwick, UK
Ammonia-Salt resorption updates

CNR-ICCOM (IT)

CNR-ITAE (IT)

Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CN)

Simon Fraiser University (CA)

University of Warwick (UK)

Mr. George Atkinson

Mr. Ahmed Abdalla

Mr. George Atkinson

Dr. Silvia Pizzanelli

Ms. Shaofei Wu

Mr. George Atkinson

Dr. Roger Moss

Prof. Belal Dawoud

Dr. Roger Moss

Mr. Sam Hinmers

Mr. George Atkinson

Dr. Silvia Pizzanelli

Mr. Guoliang An

Dr. Salvatore Vasta

Mr. Sam Hinmers

Mr. Seyedhesam Bahrehmand

Prof. Bob Critoph

Dr. Angelo Freni

Dr. Salvatore Vasta

Prof. Majid Bahrami