Recherche en Efficacité Energétique pour l’Industrie
Energy Efficiency Research in Industry

Industry confronted with energy restrictions

European Industry has recently had to face rising costs of fossil fuels and the advent of the tradable emission permit system. Energy is now becoming a major concern for businesses, but with short term economic strategies. The real pressures on oil and fossil fuels are still to come, with a peak-oil and restrictions on CO2 emissions that can only increase.
The global energy context, to which new processes will contribute, will call for sustained energy efficiency efforts on the part of both large corporations and SMEs.

Improving energy efficiency

The potential for energy efficiency and reduced CO2 emissions will depend on better energy management, the establishing of new high-energy performance applications using low-carbon content energy (nuclear electricity and renewable energy, biomass heat, etc.) and a re-design of processes, with the recovery and reuse of heat which is currently lost.

Technical and scientific challenges

To achieve this goal, ECLEER has undertaken three major lines of research:

• development of digital tools and methods to help to optimise industrial production lines, even re-designing them, where necessary, to optimise energy integration and extending this analysis to industry sectors never previously investigated through these methods: energy flow analysis, re-design of processes to reflect life cycle analysis, consideration given to economic, management and control factors

• development of high-energy-performance technologies with ad hoc energy integration for each industrial process: high-energyefficiency technologies such as induction heating, high-speed ovens, the integration of renewable energy in processes and storage methods and low-cost measuring systems

• research into ways of recycling any heat which is currently lost in industry, by developing recovery and amplification technologies: industrial heat pump, mechanical steam compression and innovative heat exchangers.