The PhD Thesis of Benjamin Zühlsdorf has been awarded the Natural Refrigeration Award 2020 by Eurammon. The PhD thesis is entitled “High-performance heat pump systems - Enhancing performance and range of heat pump systems for industry and district heating” and has been conducted as part of the ThermCyc project. The award ceremony was held online on Friday, 9th of October, and included a presentation of Benjamin’s main findings.
The thesis identified considerable performance improvement potentials, which may be obtained by the use of zeotropic mixtures for heat pump systems in applications with temperature glides. Possible increases of more than 30 % in thermodynamic performance were identified, which is high enough to compensate higher investment cost. In order to improve the exploitation of these potentials, a procedure for identifying high-performing working fluids was developed and demonstrated.
Furthermore, the thesis covered approaches that were developed for enabling high-temperature heat pump systems for process heat supply above 100 °C, which is expected to be a key-technology in the decarbonization of industrial process heat and thereby reaching the climate targets of society.
The thesis can be downloaded here.