PFAS-freie Wärmepumpen, Michael Kauffeld, HKA

Karlsruher Wärmepumpensymposium 2024
Mit großzügiger finanzieller Unterstützung namhafter Unternehmen ist es der Hochschule Karlsruhe gelungen, die deutschlandweit erste Stiftungsprofessur für Wärmepumpentechnologie einzurichten. Aus diesem freudigen Anlass laden wir zum Symposium am 20. Juni 2024 ein

so be fre heat pump uh I don’t know how it is in English but I could see that our International guests were falling asleep with all the German talking uh but maybe that’s also due to the fact uh that you arrived quite late U I don’t know is it okay in English or inut Ella Ella pens English okay then English uh so this P free heat pump we don’t have a p p free heat pump this is a project funded by some Swiss Foundation I think uh which is uh located the the project is located at this University of applied science of Eastern Switzerland and I I’m working a little bit on the side and in the in the beginning the focus was as you mentioned Andrea just the refrigerant and I said no this is not enough the heat pump has a lot of other components which may have peers inside and uh let’s have a look so the challenge is uh that the heat pumps they uh should provide clean he heating especially when when uh powered with renewable energy but uh the fgas refrigerant might be a problem because uh some of them they degrade uh in the atmosphere to something which is not so nice so this is the yeah how how it was in 2019 in Switzerland you can see there um that only a very small percentage I mean you can can hardly see the green part of the of the circle with hydrocarbon with propane so the majority is 410 a and some with 134 a and of course we had the CFC ozone layer problem and then the global warming and uh now we are talking about peers and with the hfo referance about Tri fluidic acid TFA and also when uh when when the service technician is uh is soering on the system then there might be some poisonous decomposition products um and these peas and also TFA they are forever chemicals so the TFA we find in the water will remain in the water for thousands of years so what we do today is also valid for our grandchildren Grand grandchildren and you can have many hundred times the grand before you reach a point where this will be gone again the peas are found in many places like the typical example is the frying pan the Teflon coating of The Frying Pan but also clothing is a a big area and then also in in the in the refrigeration system in the in the heat pump system for example the coating of some compressor parts to reduce the friction or the o rings uh whatsoever when it comes to the refrigerant um we have gone from natural referance to cfc’s then to hcfcs and then to hfc’s and now to hfo and with hfo the one you have in your car air conditioning system 1234 YF converts 100% to TFA in the atmosphere and the big problem I will show you a slide or a picture of that the big problem or the Big Challenge is that this happens within one or two days that’s why the global warming potential is low but that’s also whatever is uh coming out of this 1234 YF Tri fluidic acid is very local yeah so whatever we emit here will never reach Africa or Australia stays uh inside Germany here you can see how it’s working yeah we have the different emissions and then this uh the hfo decomposes to TFA also 1344a does but with 134a it’s 20 20% TFA uh which you get and the atmospheric lifetime 134a something like 8 years so whatever you emit here in Germany will decompose to TFA in Australia or in Antarctica or or somewhere but not here in in Germany and then of course the deposition happens either in the soil or in the water and eventually in the in the oceans um in the oceans we don’t drink the ocean water untreated so that’s not the big challenge but with the freshwat resources it’s a big uh challenge here’s some measurements from Switzerland for for hfos and you can see that the market introduction was somewhere around 2009 2010 and how the concentration is going up and the blue ones are for measurement close to syc so City in Switzerland and they are outside the scale so it’s just cut off and then the red ones are from Yung y so that’s somewhere on the mountains far away from civilization uh and also there the concentration is increasing and here you see a map of Switzerland with all the peas this is not only TFA this everything all all peas uh like for example from firefighting form or from from the manufacturing of something how how it is in Switzerland where there is the the highest concentration and what we can see today with measurements of the lake water in Switzerland is that we do have already something like 0.25 to 0.91 microgram per liter TFA and it cannot be removed so when you take the drinking water um because in Sur they take the water from Lake surich in Lan they take the one from F FAL they get exactly the same TFA concentration so in the end yeah if you look at beer and there are measurements of beer we also have TFA and beer so the German Purity law is no longer valid yeah we have water hops B and TFA in our beer and then uh this is a map from Germany and to the to the left you have the rivers and to the right you have the ground water and uh also there is a rising TFA concentration this is the Rin River because kru is very close to the Rin River you can see how the TFA concentration is increasing and uh very nice you can see this uh where the the NECA from stutgart is uh joining the the Ryan River and one of the reasons why there’s so much more TFA after the NECA because you have 800,000 cars uh in stutgart and uh they all emit some hfo some 1234 YF which degrades to TFA in the atmosphere and uh Rains Down locally these are some measurements from the German uh Environmental Protection Agency um from eight different measurement points from the deut vet and the conclusion is that we have 3 to five times higher TFA concentration today than what we had about 30 years ago now this one is interesting for everyone living in this area um this is a British simulation and they said okay we assume that all 134a emissions we had in the year 2015 are replaced with 1234 YF so 134a it’s like 20% TFA with the 1234 it’s it’s 100% TFA with 12 1234 it’s local with 134a it’s worldwide and we will have the highest increase in TFA right here in stutgart Munich Vienna up to 250 times more yeah and then I had a discussion with with France Quint this morning our vice director and uh this would be a way of installing a water to water heat pump when you have um when you clean the water you take the water from the ground and then you clean it and then put it back in the ground and maybe get you get the permission to install water to water heat pump uh and doing that this is from China and you can see that there are some uh peers measurements and in the blood you can do the same here um Christian where are you there yeah you you you showed me your blood or you didn’t show me your blood but the the the the laboratory evaluation so what we have to do is somehow um yeah get rid of this with the peers and here you see a heat pump and it’s not only the refrigerant it’s uh the fan motor it’s the Power Electronics uh compressor expansion valve electrical and electronic parts evaporator coating uh there are a lot of places where you have some uh peers in this heat pump uh but they only make up a small percentage of the total weight and the main fraction is in the refrigerant and unfortunately there are some Publications they state that uh in the environment 60% of the peas is coming from refrigerants in case you want to go home like Edgar you want to go home and look at your heat pump these are some of the trade names of the different uh pasas components and uh of course uh yeah they can be found in the heat pump you can also uh analyze the components if the uh if your supplier doesn’t tell you or doesn’t want to tell you then you can make a measurement uh and then find out if there’s beefers in an O-ring or wherever yeah they have these two measurement Methods at SPF in Switzerland so this is something we are doing now with Heim with their heat pumps to find out how they how much uh how many components there are with uh pfas in the heat pump and as you can see here this is an example for an outdoor heat pump reversible so it can also be used for cooling 30 kilowatt heating capacity 22.4 kilo um excuse me 20 2 kilog of refrigerant and uh that’s 98% of the pasas and the total part or the fraction inside the heat pump is only 2.8% of the weight but it’s there uh and there’s an example down there at the bottom where you can see like the compressor uh and then you have the Side Glass in the compressor and the oing of the Side Glass is the challenge because this oring is made with a component containing pasas now there’s this uh AA thing the German German uh or not the German it’s Germany the Netherlands Denmark Norway and Sweden uh made a proposal to regulate the um pasas inside the European Union and we are not alone this is a suggestion from uh from California and California is always uh ahead uh when you look at the US and they will also do something about pasas we already have seen this slide yeah it has a lot of impact on our body uh actually people are talking about that this TFA is influencing the fertility of the human uh beings which might be good against overpopulation so um um this is an example that it can be done this is a company in from the outdoor uh area and they decided some years ago uh 2010 or year or two before that to get rid of peas in all their products and the only thing which is left is their tents everything else is converted there’s no more peers in in their products and I’m sure that this is also possible to a large extent there might be a few essential use things in a heat pump or in a refrigeration system which cannot be converted but a lot of things can be converted because we also had heat pumps and we had refrigeration systems before peers were invented we had as you saw this morning or ear earlier today in the 19 1930s heat pumps running without peers so it’s possible in terms of the refrigerants um yeah there there was this investigation from nist where I started my career in 1986 and they say after hfo there’s no more chemistry doesn’t give you any more new molecules you have to go back to the Natural fluids so we can use uh all the different ones and oh let’s go one back in the 1920s propane was marketed as the the safety refrigerant because it’s non-poisonous as compared to ammonia or other ones this is the one I mentioned earlier today how the refrigeration or the refrigerator industry converted in the early 1990s and I’m quite sure also what what Lena presented you had 30 manufacturers now it’s 50 we will see we will see something similar uh for heat pumps uh in the next couple of years and unfortunately um also hydrocarbons have the highest deficiency so that’s very good we change away from pasas refrigerants to the Natural fluids and we get a higher efficiency and also the CO2 emissions during the production of the refrigerant is much lower you can see here uh that for 1234 YF it’s about 11 times more than for propane so so it’s all uh in favor of going back to where we started 100 years ago and uh yeah since I wrote this book I don’t give this to me I have enough copies so thank thank you very much for listening and are there any questions [Applause]