Can you shortly introduce yourself?

We are Nicola Paltrinieri (Professor of risk analysis; Responsible person from Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering), Daniel B. Müller (Professor at the Industrial Ecology Programme; Responsible person from Department of Energy and Process Engineering), Romain Billy (Post-doc; Department of Energy and Process Engineering) and Moritz Langhorst (PhD student; Department of Energy and Process Engineering) from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). 

Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) is a public university in Norway. The university’s headquarter is in Trondheim, with additional campuses in Gjøvik and Ålesund. NTNU is Norway’s main institution in higher education in the fields of engineering and technology with 44000 students in total.

NTNU participates with two research groups in HyInHeat:

Industrial Ecology (Department of Energy and Process Engineering)

• An interdisciplinary research programme specialized in environmental sustainability analysis.
• Our mission is to provide high quality research and education in the field of industrial ecology for supporting the global community in realizing the Sustainable Development Goals.

Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety (RAMS, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering)

• Interdisciplinary expertise in logistics, machine design, product development, materials science and risk and reliability of complex systems.
• Research on development, optimization and improvement of industrial processes and production systems.

How did NTNU get involved in the HyInHeat project?

We were asked by RWTH Aachen to join the consortium, probably due to our expertise in hydrogen energy and previous work on climate change mitigation in the aluminium and steel industries.

How do you see the added value of HyInHeat for NTNU?

Within HyInHeat NTNU will collaborate with several other partners from industry and research. This will further enhance NTNU’s expertise in aluminium and steel production as well as hydrogen technologies. Also, we hope to intensify future collaborations between NTNU and the other partners involved in HyInHeat, for example, in the form of additional research projects or student theses. 

What is the role of NTNU in the HyInHeat project?

NTNU will be involved in the development of material flow analysis (MFA) models for the aluminium and steel industries. First, this will be done on a plant-level (multi-layer MFA) to evaluate the effects of hydrogen as a fuel on the processes, emissions, and energy demand. Also, dynamic models for the European and global steel and aluminium cycles will be used to develop decarbonization scenarios and to inform industry and policy makers.

NTNU will also be involved in the development of training concepts and courses addressing the safe operation of hydrogen heating processes.

In particular, NTNU is leading WP 7 on “Evaluation of greenfield and retrofitting solutions” and other sub-tasks, such as 1.2, 2.6 (Department of Energy and Process Engineering) and 3.3 (Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering).

What do you hope to achieve by the end of the project?

We hope to gain a deeper understanding of the consequences of using hydrogen technologies in the heating processes and to develop our models in a high resolution by including a wide range of industrial data. We want to contribute to the development of supportive policy recommendations by robust and reliable climate change mitigation scenarios for the future aluminium and steel cycles. Thus, a system-wide understanding including trade-offs between the different heating options is needed.

Further, we aim at providing operational support for the use of hydrogen as a fuel while increasing general awareness of the risks associated to its technology. This will be possible by providing ad-hoc safety training for this sector operators, whose experience with hydrogen might be limited.

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