AHEAD - Advanced Heat Pump Demonstrator

AHEAD provides a solution for the great need for environmentally friendly heat supply in industrial processes, which has so far mainly been covered by natural gas. In the AHEAD project, an innovative heat pump system is being demonstrated at Takeda in Vienna. It consists of an SPH Sustainable Process Heat steam generating heat pump adapted to use natural refrigerants and combined with steam compressors to generate steam at 11 bar (a)/184°C. This heat pump solution has the potential to generate almost CO₂-free steam in over 7 months.

This corresponds to a potential CO₂ reduction of approx. 80% and means a saving of around 1600 tons of CO₂ per year at one of Takeda's largest pharmaceutical production sites at Lange Allee 24 in Vienna. This is an important milestone on the way to achieving Takeda's global sustainability goals of operating its production sites with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions before 2035. Furthermore, a concept for the roll-out of the AHEAD system will be developed for Takeda locations in Vienna and worldwide and the decarbonization potential of this technology will be examined for the most important sectors (paper, chemicals and petrochemicals, food) in Austria.

The innovations of this project are the steam-generating heat pump, which is adapted to use the natural refrigerant butane and is combined with steam compressors to achieve the highest heat utilization temperatures to date. The AHEAD system is designed to meet Takeda's requirements (11 bar(a)/184 °C) and can be expanded to temperatures of 200-260 °C without further development. AIT will develop an optimized operating strategy for the AHEAD system and the heat source using a comprehensive system model to operate the system with minimal energy requirements. A novel approach is developed to determine the decarbonization potential, which combines process requirements and expected process changes, learning curves for high-temperature heat pumps based on the experience of the demonstration operation and possible optimizations, as well as statistical data.