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Iron Power is a new technology to store and transport sustainable energy.
An iron aerosol mixture is burned in a flame and the heat is used in high temperature processes. The formed iron-oxide powder is collected and transported to places with a surplus of green hydrogen, where it is regenerated back to iron powder. As such, Iron Power is a very promising CO2-free circular energy carrier of sustainable energy, which has a very high energy density, is easy to handle, safe, environmentally friendly and cheap.
Within the fast growing Iron Power community, existing solid fuel combustion concepts are applied mostly, but these show severe problems casued by the specific character of iron aerosol flames: a) flame stabilisation is difficult to establish, b) evaporation of iron leads to nano-particles and c) high NOx emissions are also difficult to circumvent.
A completely new combustion concept is needed to solve the problems. The ERC program MetalFuel creates the basic knowledge on metal earosol combustion with the right ingredients to do solve these problems. The combustion concept developed is called ICONIC (Ignition COntrolled low-Nox Iron Combustion), which is based on the idea to recirculate part of the partly-cooled hot burnt gases and admixed to fresh air to create a mixture in which particles autoignite and flame stabilisation is guaranteed.
Furthermore, the cooling and low-O2 content of the dilluted mixture should surpress nano-particle formation as well as NOx formation. Therefore, a well-controllable ICONIC burner will be developed, designed, tested and patented in this ERC PoC progam.
A small-scale system will be developed and studied first, after which a conceptual design of Mega-Watt size will be developed which will enable future implementation in an industrial-scale system. Furthermore, the possible future market will be evaluated.
A start-up is already interested and a launching customer seems to be in view, if the PoC is succesful.
