Making the Most of Waste Energy

About this technology

Overview

According to Unitel Technologies, each and every day, all around the world, an incalculable amount of energy is wasted and literally blown into the atmosphere through power plant smokestacks and industrial and commercial heating systems. In an effort to recover and transform low-temperature waste heat into usable electronic power this energy, Unitel Technologies received a NASA grant to build a prototype waste heat-recovery system called NEOGEN. The goal was to achieve a nominal energy-savings gain of approximately 20 percent over the recuperated binary Rankine cycle. The work was carried out with assistance from the Glenn researchers and engineers from Creare, Inc., who aided in the development of the thermodynamic-analysis software. Moreover, an award from the NASA Illinois Commercialization Center supported NASA's thermodynamic-efficiency analyses of NEOGEN. Unitel Technologies plans to use the system to recover energy from other industrial plants, as well as commercial plants, electric utility facilities, diesel engines, and gas turbines.