Micro-turbine coupled to a heat-pump

Rationale and Concept

FLAMINCO is a high-efficiency gas micro-CHP heat pump enabling trigeneration: up to 135 kWth of reliable and sustainable heat for space and water heating and up to 50 kWth of cooling, or 10 kWe of electricity (and 95 kWth of heat).

FLAMINCO merges 3 promising technologies in our pathway towards energy decarbonization:

• Micro CHP is an option for micro generation of heat and electricity in individual households, collective residential, commercial and industrial buildings. Systems cab reach a global efficiency over 90% (as the best water boilers) but avoid the waste of heat occurring in centralized production, reducing CO2 emission and saving costs.
• Heat pumps work like refrigerators (they transport heat from one place to another and transform that heat from useless temperature levels into effective temperature levels). With high energy efficiency, these devices can be more advantageous than micro-CHP when the electricity is not the most interesting output (e.g. in case of difficulties to consume it or to feed it into the grid).
• Condensing boilers are water heaters fueled by gas that achieve high efficiency (typically 90%) by condensing water vapor in the exhaust gases and so recovering its latent heat of vaporization, which would otherwise have been wasted.

Case study

Several simulations we carried out to define target users and quantify the benefits that the installation of a FLAMINCO machine would bring. We considered several heating demands and studied the combination of a microturbine CHP system with a heat pump. The power of the micro-CHP, condensing boiler and heat pump were adjusted to maximize the benefits for end-users and minimize greenhouse gas emissions.

We concluded that for a 17 apartments building located in Belgium with annual heating demand of 214 MWh (close to the European average) and an annual electric power demand of 22 MWh, the yearly gas bill, the use of natural gas and the CO2 emissions are reduced by around 30% with respect to a conventional condensing boiler. The FLAMINCO machine leads to a yearly saving of 4,600 € and a payback of 4 years.