About

Who we are: Spin-off company of the Agricultural University of Athens Founded in 2021 Located at Piraeus-Greece Offers an inventory of state-of-the-art heat recovery, upgrading, and power generation products and solutions Main activities: Heat to power applications with advanced architecture ORC units High temperature heat pumps Heat transfer solutions for individual industrial applications

Solution & Product

Large amounts of excess heat are wasted in various processes with the waste heat recovery market experiencing a high growth globally. This market concerns the further utilisation of waste heat with the most mainstream techniques being the re-use of this heat or its conversion to power. Nevertheless, it is commonly known that power cannot be extracted in an efficient and cost-effective manner from low temperature heat. Within this temperature range, Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) is currently the prevailing heat-to-power conversion technology. The ORC market is growing fast during the last years, reaching almost 3 GW of total installed capacity, especially biomass and industrial heat recovery projects, revealing the potential of these sectors. However, there are few commercial products with limited number of sales for low temperature heat sources (below 150 oC) and small sizes applications (i.e. below 50 kW), due to both ORC high cost and low performance. The new product aims to address the challenging low-grade waste heat market, by bridging the stipulated gap between “cost” and “performance”. The core objective is to finalise the development and commercialize an innovative heat-to-power engine with a novel volumetric expansion machine that approaches the isothermal expansion process. From the thermodynamics’ theory, it is well known that when a gas is expanded (almost) isothermally, the maximum possible work is produced. This high thermal content of the expanded gas can be fur

Innovation & Scalability

The startup as a spin-off company owns innovative characteristics that have been acknowledged during the university’s internal assessment procedure. The main unique selling propositions (USP) are directly related to the innovative features of the new product, as highlighted in the previous sections, resulting to the following USP: •tHigher efficiency by about 25% than competing ORC products (e.g. ORCAN, Enogia, etc.) •tReduced price per produced kWe than competing solutions. •tA PBP of even 2-3 years, increasing the profitability of the end-users and attractive to invest. •tNo limitation for integration to existing biogas-CHP units, still offering heat of adequate temperature. •tHigh modularity due to the use of multiple expanders to address a large range of applications and sizes. •tHigh flexibility for operating at CHP or power-only mode.

Traction & achievements

The important achievements/milestones are: •tThermoDraft was recognised and established as a spin-off of the Agricultural University of Athens (AUA), meaning that fully fulfils the relevant innovation criteria set by the legal framework. •An analytical business plan has been elaborated and admitted by AUA administration •ThermoDraft has the capacity of manufacturing its innovative products (ORC, air-conditioning and heat exchangers) since it collaborates with a fully equipped workshop for this purpose •Company’s team has recruited high-level staff that owns both academic and industrial experience in products/solutions offered •Company branding has been finalised

Team & Why Us

•Dr.-Ing Dimitris Manolakos is a Mechanical Engineer of the National Technical University of Athens and an Associate professor at the Agricultural University of Athens. He is specialized on heating and cooling and heat to power conversion technologies. •Dr.-Ing Pantelis Bakalis is a Mechanical Engineer. He holds a Doctorate Diploma in computational fluid dynamics and numerical heat transfer from University of Patras Polytechnic School. He is specialized in HVAC applications, computational CFD and heat transfer and heat recovery applications. •Dr.-Ing Erika Ntavou is a Mechanical Engineer of the National Technical University of Athens. She holds a doctoral diploma from the Mechanical Engineering School of N.T.U.A. Her main research area of interest includes the development of low temperature, heat-to-power conversion systems, with application especially in water desalination units and water treatment systems towards NZL.

Funding Needs

Funding need will be covered through research programs and self funding.