Liquid Air Energy Storage performance enhancement by means of Organic Rankine Cycle and Absorption Chiller

Alessio Tafone, Emiliano Borri, Gabriele Comodi, Martijn van den Broek and Alessandro Romagnoli

Applied Energy, 2018, vol. 228, issue C, 1810-1821

Abstract: In this paper, the potential of improving the round trip efficiency of Liquid Air Energy Storage was investigated through modelling and simulations using the numerical software EES-Engineering Equation Solver. Liquid Air Energy Storage is a novel energy storage concept whose performance is actually limited both by the inefficiencies of the charging (liquefaction cycle) and discharging (regasification and expansion) leading to a low value of round trip efficiency when compared to other energy storage solutions. In order to further improve the round trip efficiency, the opportunity to recover the waste heat released during the compression has been considered in this paper. Different integrated energy systems consisting Organic Rankine Cycle and/or Absorption Chiller were compared against a stand-alone Liquid Air Energy Storage used as a baseline. The integrated systems are compared in terms of different performance indices such as electric power output, ORC efficiency, round trip and overall efficiency of the stand-alone and integrated systems and utilization factor of the waste heat recovery systems. The results show that a tight integration between Liquid Air Energy Storage and Organic Rankine Cycle allows to significantly improve the round trip efficiency (up to 20%). Although the introduction of the absorption chiller decreases the specific consumption, the round trip efficiency is not improved due to the lower quality of waste heat available at the LAES discharge phase. The most remarkable results are achieved when the LAES is operated in trigenerative configuration: the introduction of both Organic Rankine Cycle and Absorption Chiller in combination with Liquid Air Energy Storage was found to improve the round trip efficiency by 30% due to a better utilization of the available waste heat.

Keywords: Liquid Air Energy Storage; Waste Heat Recovery; Organic Rankine Cycle; Absorption Chiller; Trigeneration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191831002X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:228:y:2018:i:c:p:1810-1821

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.06.133

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().