High-temperature heat pumps (HTHPs) are emerging as pivotal technologies for decarbonizing industrial heat supply by upgrading low-grade waste heat to meet diverse thermal demands. This review summarizes and analyzes the current state, applications and future trends of HTHPs from a carbon–neutral perspective. Core technological aspects—including cycle configurations, refrigerants, compressors, and integration strategies—are systematically analyzed. Thermodynamic comparisons reveal that cascade and coupled cycles can achieve temperature lifts above 100 °C under optimized conditions. The transition from high global warming potential (GWP) hydrofluorocarbons toward low-GWP hydrofluoroolefins, hydrochlorofluoroolefins, and natural refrigerants is accelerating. Large-capacity screw and centrifugal compressors are identified as key enablers for industrial-scale deployment. Typical industrial deployments of HTHPs across various fields are introduced, mainly structured around their application potential, integration characteristics, and implementation methods within energy-intensive sectors (e.g., paper manufacturing, textile dyeing). Future development will focus on high-power systems, advanced working fluid design, and digital control integration with renewable power and thermal storage. Collectively, HTHPs constitute an essential electrification pathway for achieving deep industrial decarbonization and carbon–neutral energy systems.

Electroplating wastewater must be properly treated before being discharged to the environment. A new type of evaporation system, called mechanical vapor recompression (MVR), was designed and studied in this paper. A series of experiments were performed to determine the evaporation and chemical characteristics of the wastewater. During MVR operation, the wastewater and treated water were sampled hourly at the monitoring points. The results showed that after the MVR evaporation, the chemical oxygen demand (COD) decreased from 5,450 to $550\mathrm{mg}/\mathrm{L}$ , the average Cu content decreased from 55 to $0.5\mathrm{mg}/\mathrm{L}$ , and the Ni and Zn contents decreased from 65 and $50\mathrm{mg}/\mathrm{L}$ to less than $0.2\mathrm{mg}/\mathrm{L}$ . In addition, the evaporation was approximately $260\mathrm{kg}/\mathrm{h}$ at an evaporative temperature of 90°C and increased with increasing compressor frequency; the variation in the compressor power followed the same trend as the variation in the evaporation capacity.

This paper presents the development and utilisation of a heat regeneration approach to enhancing the performance and reducing the life-cycle cost of supercooled water ice slurry generation systems. Two supercooled water systems with direct and indirect ice slurry generation were enhanced by the heat regeneration approach to avoid excessive cold loss and increase the supercooling degree, thereby improving system efficiency while reducing operational costs. Their respective performance and life-cycle costs were experimentally evaluated and compared to the ones without heat regeneration enhancement under different working conditions, as well as to a conventional scraped surface ice slurry generator used as a benchmark. It was found from the comparative investigation that the heat regeneration approach can effectively reduce the water temperature at the inlet of the supercooler, allowing a significant amount of cold loss to be saved for ice slurry generation. The effective utilisation rate of cold can be effectively improved by over 15% when using the heat regeneration approach, and the unit ice mass power consumption can be reduced by 12–20%. Due to the attractive energy-saving potential, the operational cost-effectiveness of the enhanced systems contributed to cut-down of life-cycle cost. It was found that the life-cycle costs of the enhanced direct and indirect ice slurry generation systems were 62.0% and 74.7% lower than that of the conventional scraped surface ice slurry generator, respectively.

Sensor failures reduce the spatial information available for greenhouse microclimate monitoring, but their practical consequences depend on whether agronomic risk decisions remain reliable. We evaluated the progressive loss of paired indoor temperature–relative humidity (T/RH) sensors in a Chinese solar greenhouse using whole-sensor holdout. Longitudinally and vertically balanced subsets and transparent estimators were frozen before a sealed final test of 28 dates, four calendar blocks and six stage-aware risks. Relative to a 20-input reference, a longitudinally and vertically balanced six-input network increased the temperature mean absolute error by 0.014 °C and the relative-humidity error by 0.027 percentage points; macro-recall changed by −0.001 and support-aware macro-F1 by −0.004, while median false-negative exposure remained unchanged. The results remained within the predefined limits across 26 agricultural-threshold variants. In an exploratory validation-only comparison, spatially concentrated six-input layouts had greater temperature error (+0.080 °C, 95% block-bootstrap interval +0.058 to +0.104 °C), relative-humidity error (+0.099 percentage points), and macro-F1 loss (−0.004) than longitudinally and vertically balanced layouts. Macro-F1 did not differ consistently between the longitudinally and vertically balanced layouts and the unconstrained random layouts. Longitudinal and vertical coverage therefore functions as a robustness constraint against concentrated input loss in this system, rather than evidence of universal six-sensor sufficiency or cross-greenhouse generalisation.