The Swiss ORC Symposium took place annually between 2014 and 2018 and provided an insight into topics and problem areas relating to total energy utilization. Experts from various fields met at the symposium to examine individual aspects of waste heat recovery in depth, with two to three topics of focus being defined each year for this purpose.
Well over half of the worldwide consumption of primary energy sources is for the generation of heat, either as an intermediate step in the conversion to mechanical or electrical energy, or directly, for example to provide process heat in industry. A significant portion of this thermal energy escapes into the environment as waste heat. Exploiting this waste heat for the generation of electricity by means of ORC processes therefore offers considerable potential for increasing the overall efficiency of energy utilization.
