New salt hydrate composite for low-grade thermal energy storage

Abbas Mehrabadi and Mohammed Farid

Energy, 2018, vol. 164, issue C, 194-203

Abstract: This study aims to develop a new salt-based thermochemical composite for long-term storage of low-grade thermal energy which enables overcoming mismatch between energy demand and supply. The energy density and dehydration behaviour of five different salts; Al2(SO4)3·18H2O and MgSO4·7H2O, CaCl2·6H2O, MgCl2·6H2O, and SrCl2·6H2O are examined. Subsequently, the performance of two low cost host porous structures; expanded clay and pumice, impregnated with the most suitable salt for storing low-grade thermal energy is studied over a few number of cycles using a lab-scale packed bed reactor. The results showed that SrCl2·6H2O has the highest energy density and lowest dehydration temperature so that >80% of its energy density can be stored at <90 °C. Thermal cycling the composite materials revealed that up to 29 kWh/m3 and 7.3 kWh/m3 energy can be stored using expanded clay-SrCl2 (40 wt%) and pumice-SrCl2 (14 wt%), respectively. However, the performance of expanded clay dropped sharply over four cycles while the generated power using pumice composite was sustained almost constant over ten cycles. Although pumice-SrCl2 is a promising composite in terms of cyclability, further research is required to improve its energy storage capacity to make it attractive for large scale applications.

Keywords: Solar energy; Energy storage; Salt hydrate; SrCl2; Pumice; Expanded clay (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544218317298
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:energy:v:164:y:2018:i:c:p:194-203

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2018.08.192

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

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