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INNOVATION
Novel heat exchangers for thermochemical storages
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Market Maturity: Exploring
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Market Creation Potential
This innovation was assessed by the JRC’s Market Creation Potential indicator framework as addressing the needs of existing markets and existing customers. Learn more
Women-led innovation
A woman had a leadership role in developing this innovation in at least one of the Key Innovator organisations listed below.
Go to Market needs
Needs that, if addressed, can increase the chances this innovation gets to (or closer to) the market incude:
  • Prepare for Market entry
  • Scale-up market opportunities
Location of Key Innovators developing this innovation
Key Innovators
UN Sustainable Development Goals(SDG)
This innovation contributes to the following SDG(s)
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 7
Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all

The UN explains: "Energy is central to nearly every major challenge and opportunity the world faces today. Be it for jobs, security, climate change, food production or increasing incomes, access to energy for all is essential.

Transitioning the global economy towards clean and sustainable sources of energy is one of our greatest challenges in the coming decades. Sustainable energy is an opportunity – it transforms lives, economies and the planet."

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 13
Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

The UN explains: "Affordable, scalable solutions are now available to enable countries to leapfrog to cleaner, more resilient economies. The pace of change is quickening as more people are turning to renewable energy and a range of other measures that will reduce emissions and increase adaptation efforts."

The EU-funded Research Project
This innovation was developed under the Horizon Europe project 4TunaTES with an end date of 31/01/2028
  • Read more about this project on CORDIS
Description of Project 4TunaTES
To accelerate the energy transition there is an urgent need for energy storage both for electricity and heat due to the intermittency of renewable resources. As a large part of our energy consumption is in form of thermal energy (78% in the built environment), and as there is a large amount of unused low temperature waste heat (8900 PJ in Europe), thermal energy storage offers route towards bridging availability and demand. Long term loss-free compact heat storage is the missing link, and Thermo-Chemical Energy Storage (TCES) has the potential to play this role. Unfortunately, present TCES concepts lack flexibility as a precise fit between the phase diagram of TCES-materials, the system design and the temperature demand of an application is needed. Therefore, most of the R&D for applying TCES is very specific for a particular application and switching to another application requires that much of the R&D process has to be redone. 4TunaTES will deliver a groundbreaking flexible TCES technology that can be easily adapted to different applications (variable in- and output temperatures) and thereby reduce the development costs by 90% as the R&D the process does not have be redone repeatedly. 4TunaTES develops a TCES-prototype that can be used for domestic use cases, which addresses three challenges: 1) radically new TCES materials with tunable phase diagrams by using a second gas or dopants, 2) heat exchanging components with a high degree of manufacturing flexibility, and 3) revolutionary systems with electricity adapted thermodynamic cycles. CNR and DLR will integrate the key findings in their high-TRL project portfolio, and Cellcius (CEL) will integrate the successful materials and designs in their technology. This will unlock the potential thermal energy storage. For this purpose, a strong consortium has been built which brings together computational material scientists (VUB), physical-chemists (TUE, CIIAE), mechanical engineers (CNR, DLR) and heat battery developer (CEL).

Innnovation Radar's analysis of this innovation is based on data collected on 04/04/2025.
The unique id of this innovation in the European Commission's IT systems is: 135468