Fuel efficiency has become a priority for the whole truck industry as fuel represents more than 35% of the freight operators total cost of ownership. Saving 5% of fuel triples freight operators’ net margins and saves 6 tonnes of CO2 annually per truck. Knowing that one third of the fuel introduced in a thermal engine is lost as waste heat in exhaust gases, harvesting this huge quantity of heat to create additional energy represents an untapped opportunity to save fuel. EXOES wants to seize this unique business opportunity. During 7 years of R&D, EXOES developed the most strategic component of a waste heat recovery system (ORC): the expander. Branded EVE® (for Energy Via Exhaust), this very innovative TRL6 expansion machine was tested in representative environments labs by major truck manufacturers and worldwide Tier 1s. Such tests revealed an outstanding 5% fuel-consumption reduction (25% higher than competitors), what offers to the freight operators a payback period of less than 2 years. EVE® also allows truck manufacturers and Tier 1s to generate new revenues and margins. Thanks to its compatibility with any single truck platform, EVE® reduces their investment risks. With these advantages on its competitors, EXOES can target the worldwide heavy commercial vehicles segment. EXOES needs now to achieve a 5% fuel consumption reduction under real road tests via the DEMOTRUCK, to prepare the industrialisation of the EVE® expander in a design-to-cost approach, to design the manufacturing plant for key sub-components and to assess the maintenance interval (more than 1,000 hours targeted). These are prerequisites before signing the first licencing agreement with a Tier 1. Preparing the international replication in addition summarise the TORC objectives that will make from EXOES the global leader in ORC systems with more than 230,000 EVE units installed on trucks. By 2022, the company will have created more than 210 jobs and generated a cumulative turnover of € 56 m.

REGEN-BY-2 will research, design, construct and experiment a first-of-its-kind lab-scale prototype of a recent near-worldwide patented thermodynamic cycle and related plant for the conversion of thermal sources in energy vectors, i.e. electric, heating and-or cooling powers. The start-up TIFEO, which was founded in 2018 by the team leading this proposal and is the exclusive licensee of the patent driving REGEN-BY-2, is a potential European Unicorn. REGEN-BY-2 can convert (from small to large-scale) any typology of renewable thermal source from low to high-temperature (e.g. solar, aerothermal, geothermal, hydrothermal) including additional thermal sources (e.g. waste heat). REGEN-BY-2 is enabled by machines capable to work with two-phase fluids, i.e. constituted by both liquid and vapor phases. The patented thermodynamic cycle is highly efficient as it is constituted by a proper combination of Carnot cycles operating with two-phase fluid circulating in novel two-phase expanders and two-phase compressors. To be successful, these two-phase machines will have to be designed, prototyped and integrated in the REGEN-BY-2 lab-scale prototype. Moreover, the patented technology has large flexibility due to the control of many process parameters, allowing chasing and satisfying the end-users energy demands in a predictable and dispatchable way. By the exploitation of renewable thermal sources from small to large-scale, by converting them more efficiently and with more flexibility into electric, heating and-or cooling energy vectors, REGEN-BY-2 will induce greater demand for and increasing use of renewable thermal sources. REGEN-BY-2 is a breakthrough in our energy infrastructure as it can be used in wide energy sectors (e.g. District Heating&Cooling systems and Distributed Renewable Flexible Energy systems). The research is low-TRL and high risk. For this, a full value international chain is assembled (Universities, RTOs, SMEs, Large Enterprises, a Standards Organization).