Recovering the heat from a chimney
A coil in the chimney, steam, a turbine and a generator feeding the grid. The idea was born in a crematorium, but the problem belongs to anyone throwing heat up a pipe.
A crematorium burns at a thousand degrees and sends all that heat up the chimney.
That was the starting point, but writing the specification made it clear that the crematorium is not the market, it is the most obvious use case. A chimney venting hot gases belongs to a ceramics factory, an industrial bakery, a thermal plant, an incinerator or any hotel with a boiler, and in all of them the same thing happens: the heat is generated, used once and released into the atmosphere, because recovering it requires an installation nobody has designed at that size. The invention is that installation. A coil housed in the duct itself collects the combustion heat without interfering with the extraction, turns it into steam, the steam drives a turbine and the generator feeds the distribution grid. No new land, no change to the process upstream, no shutdown: you use what is already burning.
The coil, not the boiler
What is registered is not a new boiler but the unit that couples to an existing chimney. That distinction is what makes the invention installable: whoever already has the furnace does not have to touch it, and the payback is calculated on the added equipment alone.
From heat to grid
Recovery, steam generation, turbine and a generator connected to the distribution grid. The whole chain is in the claims, which is what separates an idea from a registrable invention.
Why it came out of a funeral home
Because that is where the waste is hardest to justify: it runs daily, at constant temperature, and the heat it expels has no downstream use. If it pays there, it pays sooner in a factory.
Residual heat recovery unit, drawings from the specification