A team from the Energy Department of Politecnico di Milano, led by Professor Giacomo Persico, is a partner in the recent H2020 project “CO2OLHEAT- Supercritical CO2 power cycles demonstration in Operational environment Locally valorising industrial Waste Heat“. The total budget of the project is around 18.8 million euros and it will last for four years, between June 2021 and May 2025.
CO2OLHEAT aims to support the EU objectives of energy efficiency and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by exploiting waste heat from industrial processes and converting it into electricity through an energy system based on innovative closed thermodynamic cycles with carbon dioxide under supercritical conditions (sCO2). The technical realisation of this system requires the development of state-of-the-art technologies for the calculation, design and analysis of the various innovative components that make up the system.

The project will lead to the realisation of an industrially relevant performance demonstrator (2 MW), which will be installed and operated in a real industrial context, i.e. in the CEMEX cement plant near Prachovice (Chechen Republic). This will be the first sCO2 power plant in the EU.
In particular, the research group led by Prof. Persico will make a decisive and multidisciplinary contribution to the project, bringing together the skills of the Laboratory of Fluid Dynamics of Machines (LFM) with those of the Energy Conversion Systems Group (GECOS) of the Department of Energy. On the fluid-dynamic front, research will focus on optimising the shape of the sCO2 compressor (the most critical component of the system) and on high-fidelity analysis of the performance and operation of the compressor itself and the high-pressure turbine. On the energy side, the study will focus on analysing the thermodynamic behaviour of the system both at design conditions and, more importantly, at off-design conditions. These activities are essential for the development and demonstration in a real industrial context of a highly innovative system such as that proposed by CO2OLHEAT, which will be the first sCO2 plant in Europe.