Sector
Chemicals Materials Construction

Timber

Examples of partnerships with companies in the sector

INDUNOR provides the auto and construction sectors with natural foam, free from volatil organic compounds

Partnership ICÉEL Carnot Institute - INDUNOR

Industrial firms want expandable or flexible foam insulation! These foams are made from synthetic resins and handling and using them involves proven health risks due to the presence of formaldehyde and other VOCs. By teaming up with Lermab (Carnot ICÉEL Institute), Indunor – a specialist in tannin production – has come up with alternative natural resins that can be used to make pollutant-free foam.

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Partnership ICÉEL Carnot Institute - INDUNOR

INDUNOR provides the auto and construction sectors with natural foam, free from volatil organic compounds

Industrial firms want expandable or flexible foam insulation! These foams are made from synthetic resins and handling and using them involves proven health risks due to the presence of formaldehyde and other VOCs. By teaming up with Lermab (Carnot ICÉEL Institute), Indunor – a specialist in tannin production – has come up with alternative natural resins that can be used to make pollutant-free foam.

Supporting Innovation

Studies performed since the 1980s into the harmfulness of formaldehyde and volatil organic compounds have led certain governments to limit or even prohibit their use. The hazards of exposing employees to chemical risks, as well as consumer protection requirements are forcing industrial companies to come up with new formulae for producing the foams that have become so essential in thermal and electrical insulation and soundproofing. Indunor's engineers wished to harness certain characteristics of tannins – and their extensive expertise in tannin extraction – to come up with a biosourced component that could replace petrochemical-based resins. This Argentine-based company has been working with tannins from the quebracho – a tree that is native to the Gran Chaco province in South America – and the chestnut tree. Thanks to research carried out by Lermab (ICÉEL Carnot Institute), these tannins can be used in resins suitable for producing foams adapted to different uses. They have remarkable strength, fire resistance and thermal insulation qualities and provide industrial firms with sustainable solutions.  Indunor has set up a “Natural resins” division that rounds out its food and health products offering.

The client needs

INDUNOR, a Silvateam Group subsidiary, is a big player in tannin and vegetable extraction and commercialisation. It produces and markets food additives, stabilizers, thickeners and supplements on a global scale. While tannins have traditionally been used in leatherwork and winemaking, they have also been used to produce highly fire-resistant foams with great insulation properties since the 2000s.  However, the mimosa it had previously been using was not sufficient to meet burgeoning demand and Indunor needed to find a viable long-term alternative. The quebracho tree contains condensed tannins (their structure is similar to flavonoids, i.e., they polymerize), and those of the chestnut are hydrolyzable (polyester carbohydrates and phenolic acids). To analyse these tannins, and turn them into a raw material capable of meeting the needs of industrial firms, Indunor teamed up with the Lermab laboratory, which boasts 20 years’ experience in the production of tannin-based foams.

Partnership

ICÉEL Carnot Institute, based in eastern France, works in the field of materials, processes,  environment and energy. It combines 27 labs and technical centres, including Lermab, which specialises in research into wood, covering the molecular to the macroscopic level, and even wooden structures. A research partnership lasting several years, underpinned by a doctoral thesis, culminated in the filing of a number of patents on a co-ownership basis. Lermab, along with the Jean Lamour Institute, another part of ICÉEL in charge of the characterisation work, has enabled Indunor to market natural resins that represent real progress in solving a worldwide problem. The Silvateam Group is seeking to consolidate the leadership of its subsidiary, Indunor, in sustainably produced resins that help businesses comply with environmental guidelines. The enthusiasm of industrial companies for Indunor’s natural resins is a testimony to the success of this cooperation venture.

June 2020

R-CUE harnesses residual heat from a district heating network to a high-performance system for drying wood.

Carnot Institute MICA - R-CUE

R-CUE is helping to meet increasing demand for firewood by reusing the unavoidable heat from its district heating network. The hot air driven through specially-adapted containers – designed in partnership with Carnot MICA Institute – dries the logs in just a few hours instead of in a couple of years !

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Carnot Institute MICA - R-CUE

R-CUE harnesses residual heat from a district heating network to a high-performance system for drying wood.

R-CUE is helping to meet increasing demand for firewood by reusing the unavoidable heat from its district heating network. The hot air driven through specially-adapted containers – designed in partnership with Carnot MICA Institute – dries the logs in just a few hours instead of in a couple of years !

Supporting Innovation

In 2013, R-CUE (a French acronym for Eastern district heating network) inaugurated a biomass cogeneration plant and heating network that serves the equivalent of 3500 dwellings in the town of Saint-Louis. The plant uses local wood chips and corn cobs to heat over 300 m3 of water flowing through the networks’ 12 km of pipes. Thanks to the energy recovered from the smoke using a condenser, a water circuit heated to nearly 50°C projects hot air into specially-designed containers, each containing 20 cubic meters of 25 cm wood blocks. The contribution of Carnot MICA Institute has helped to optimise end-of-process humidity content, giving the fuel excellent heating properties while minimizing pollution. Thence, the plant gets improved energy efficiency and meets a growing societal demand.

The client needs

Since 2014, power plants must recover their sources of residual heat and R-CUE and R-CUA were created in that year as “carbon-light” heat producers. The subsidiaries of R-GDS and Primeo Energie (formerly EBM), along with R-CUA (Alsace district heating network), quickly gained a dominant foothold in the virtuous heating network sector. As part of its quest for a solution that would enable it to re-use the unavoidable heat from the Saint-Louis plant, the SME contacted Carnot MICA Institute. It only took a few brief exchanges to pinpoint an opportunity to apply the Institute’s expertise in material behaviour to the private wood fuel market. Demand is increasing, however timber needs to be dried for one to two years before the humidity content can be reduced from an average of 75% to under 20%, thus providing satisfactory heating properties. R-CUE gave Carnot MICA Institute a free hand to come up with a solution while also boosting its energy efficiency by designing an easy-to-use process with a big local impact. The two partners are working together to come up with a rapid drying system for wood blocks that harnesses waste heat from the network. The results of this green innovation have been highly satisfactory for the company, which has boosted its energy efficiency by 10% and created 10 direct and indirect jobs. In 2018, R-CUE began operating a second drying plant in the town of Sarre-Union capable of drying 10 000 cubic meters of wood a year.

Partnership

Carnot MICA Institute harnesses its expertise in functional materials, surfaces, interfaces and related processes to devise solutions for diverse business sectors, including luxury goods, the environment, sports, automobiles and energy. The insides of the container provide optimal drying conditions by pulsing hot air from one end and they have been designed using researcher expertise in materials and their transformation. Their command of interactions and behaviour within a divided and heterogeneous mix of materials was used to develop a model that provides the drying time required based on a simple humidity rate reading taken when the timber arrives. This first partnership between R-CUE and Carnot MICA has helped the French National Forestry Office (ONF) to improve productivity through more effective rotation and more enlightened forestry management practices.
It has been so successful that the two entities are planning to continue their strategic innovation collaboration on a long-term basis. For example, R-CUA, the other subsidiary, is set to reap the benefits of Carnot’s research into materials capable of storing heat over long periods. This low heat loss stored energy may be recovered at a later stage, either to reduce fuel consumption or to meet a specific demand outside of the domestic heating season, such as heating swimming pools.

April 2020
Other sectors Chemicals Materials Construction