TORRECID opens its facilities to demonstrate the operation of the furnaces developed in the VULKANO project

On 18 and 19 September a meeting was held at Instalaciones de TORRECID, L’Alcora (Province of Castellón) within the context of the H2020 VULKANO project, led by the CIRCE Foundation.

This way, one of the objectives of the demonstrator focused on implementing the VULKANO solution in one of its industrial furnaces and increasing its energy and environmental efficiency is achieved. In this case the demonstrator will validate three of the strategies that make up the integrated solution VULKANO, the new refractories developed, associated monitoring systems and the holistic and predictive tool.

The VULKANO project focuses on designing, implementing and validating an integrated solution to promote and increase the efficiency, both energy and environmental, of industrial furnaces powered by natural gas and their adjacent processes. The VULKANO integrated solution consists of five action strategies: new refractories that overcome the durability limitations of current ones, new more efficient co-combustion systems for replacing natural gas with bio-gas, new algorithms to improve control systems and a holistic and predictive tool to evaluate and parameterize different plant variables and indicators to improve decision-making by applying the life cycle perspective. The VULKANO solution is being implemented in two real installations, one in the ceramic sector (in Spain) and another in the steel sector (Slovenia), as well as validating the feasibility of replication in a third sector, the aluminium sector (in Turkey).

We visited the plant of TORRECID, host partner of the event and leader of the VULKANO demonstration in the ceramic sector, where we had the opportunity to see the furnace already in operation.

The meeting, in which 27 participants from the 12 partners of the consortium were present, addressed issues such as the consolidation and improvement of the scope of the results, the final stretch of the project (4 months from its completion) to establish times and lines to develop its maximum efficiency and the continuity of the innovative post-project VULKANO solution.