Silvie Petránková Ševčíková

The Energy Research Centre (ERC) was established on March 2, 1999 thanks to the backing of the VŠB – Technical University of Ostrava and the subsidy of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic on the project “Energy Resource Utilization” within the programme “Strengthening HEI's Research Potential”. The new institution drew on long-term experience of the Department of Energy Engineering.

Since January 2002 the Energy Research Centre has become an independent HE institute in accordance with the Higher Education Act no. 111/1998 Coll. Since January 2021 ERC has become part of Energy and environmental technology centre.

The ERC activities are highly varied, covering a wide range of various fields. The most important ones include above all research and development and cooperation with industrial partners.

Research and development is oriented on:

• Improvement of technical level of combustion facilities > investigation of a principle of combustion processes, > improvement of the energy transformation process,

  increase of equipment energy efficiency, reduction of negative impacts of solid fuel combustion on the living environment.

• Alternative processes of thermic transformation

  experimental verification of gasification in an autotherm autoclave, utilization of biomass for cogeneration, proposals and innovations for energogas cleaning, production of liquid bio-fuels of the 2nd generation.

• Safety in power engineering and industry

  identification of risks related to the use of alternative fuels, classification and management of risks related to chemical substances, evaluation of lower explosive limit of gases and dusts, problems of nanoparticles, resilience of society and energy.

All the main directions of R&D works in the ERC are concentrated in the INEF Centre (Innovation for Efficiency and the Environment). This regional research – development Centre was built in 2010 – 2014 thanks to a project of the same name funded from the OP Research and Development for Innovation.

The ERC includes also the accredited testing laboratory no. 1166. 3 for measurements of heat engineering quantities. This workplace has also an authorization of the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic for pollutant emissions measurements and for education of workers in the field of emission measurement on all competence levels.

Cooperation wtih industrial partners is oriented on:

elaboration of energy studies (TES), energy audits (EA), energy assessment (EA) and building energy use intensity certificates (EUI) , energy monitoring and optimization (EnergoGuard), monitoring of renewable resources (SunnyGuard), design engineering in energy, safety of fuels and technologies, testing of boilers.

Beside the energy services, the cooperation with industrial partners in a field of European and national chemical legislation has been established. This cooperation includes the following activities:

1. consulting and implementation of Regulation (EC) no. 1970/2006 on Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH),

   complex processing of authorization dokumentation according to Regulation REACH compilation of Material Safety Data Sheets according to Regulation REACH including classification according to Regulation (EC) no. 1272/2007 (CLP regulation)

2. consulting and implementation of legislature in a field of occupational health protection,

3. field of risk assessment and risk management for the use of chemical substances,

   creation of exposure scenarios (Safety data sheet Annex II), modeling risks arising from the use of chemicals.