At the head of Marbeuf Conseil et Recherche, Bruno Sanglé-Ferrière has developed a patented process to produce electricity with very high temperature fuel cells combined with the recycling of the exhaust heat to produce the fuel. An advance that opens the way to new industrial efficiencies and even the use of low temperature heat to produce electricity.
You have oriented Marbeuf Consulting and Research towards energy recycling. What does your innovation consist of and how does it fit into your work?
Marbeuf Conseil et Recherche already existed, but I refocused it on a process that I imagined and which is based on a simple idea: nothing gets lost. I have designed a system in which the thermal energy released by a very high temperature fuel cell is recycled through a chemical process. Where conventional technologies largely dissipate heat or residual energy, we capture it, convert it and re-inject it into the production cycle. This circular logic allows to achieve a full conversion efficiency than the known standards, thanks to a coupling between energy conversion and thermal recovery.
How was this idea born, and how did you protect it?
The idea came by linking areas that until then had coexisted without truly dialoguing: on one hand, high-temperature devices capable of generating considerable energy at high temperature, and on the other, the techniques that allow converting water into hydrogen through endothermic reactions. I simply made the connection between the two, then added a heat pump system to complete the supply of heat for some of the chemical reactions. Remained to verify that everything was working: the calculations validated the approach, and we are now working on dimensioning the full system. It is a delicate work, because the sulfur-oxide cycle us a difficult cycle to implement. We have obtained a patent, which constitutes a decisive advance: any integration of this technology in industrial devices will have to go through our solution.
What industrial applications are you targeting, and what message do you want to send to energy players?
The scope is broad: autonomous energy production, energy storage, and even air and water cooling. What we propose is a technological brick that allows a step forward in performance and sobriety. My message is simple: come discover this innovation, and discuss partnerships. The objective is clear: to contribute concretely to the energy transition by making systems more efficient, more competitive and capable of recovering an energy that until then had been ignored.