ZHENIT project

Testing on board of vessels waste heat recovery solutions and digital tools to make EU shipping sector frontier innovator in maritime pollution reduction.

ZHENIT Project aims to promote Waste Heat Recovery (WHR) as key and “ready-to-implement” solutions to achieve 2030 IMO/EU targets for shipping sector decarbonization. ZHENIT goal is to fully untap “on-board WH potential” developing and validating WHR solutions at different temperature levels for different on-board services (cooling, power, desalination), in order to valorise heat in different vessel processes.

ZHENIT will strategically define a plan to boost WHR, and energy management onboards, providing clean energy solutions and “low emissions” ship services (e.g. desalinated water, power, on board HVAC etc.), with a significant impact already in the short-term. The project aims to exploit the WHR potential on vessels by means of new technologies development, on-board validation as well as regulatory framework analysis through the development of a replication roadmap at regulatory and economic level. The ZHENIT experience in holistically integrating and managing different “ready to go” WH-to-X systems, energy management and hybrid propulsion technologies could be also leveraging for future applications in other vessels, towards 0-WH.

To do so ZHENIT technologies will be demonstrated at TRL 5 and they will showcase how WH-to-X if properly integrated with Digital Solutions (energy monitoring and optimized management – SIGLA, KYMA) and wind hybrid propulsion (wingsail by BOUND4BLUE) can bring up to a 25% reduction of vessel energy consumption. Validation results will drive a replication roadmap (at regulatory and economic level) towards 2027-2030 marketability of ZHENIT solutions also thanks to realization of replication feasibility studies via modelling tools and approaches already exploited for terrestrial application.

In this way, ZHENIT consortium, composed by 11 partners from 7 countries under RINA Consulting coordination, will demonstrate the integration of WH-to-X solutions towards a zero WH vessel.

ZHENIT was funded by the European Commission in the framework of Horizon Europe research and innovation program Grant Agreement 101056801 in line with the commitment to decarbonize the shipping sector targeting ambitious decarbonisation goals set by IMO.