Assessment and Comparison of Performance of Thermal and Electrical Battery for Renewable Energy Applications

About this project

Project description

The project targets to harness the excess electricity (or electricity spillage) generated by solar PV and wind power plants which will be converted into thermal energy, and in turn will be stored in a thermal energy storage system (Thermal battery). The thermal battery is envisaged to store heat at high temperatures (?900°C) and act as heat source for subsequent cogeneration applications. Conventional electrical batteries can store electricity for future usage but their low energy storage capacity and less durability pave way for the recent contender in the area viz. thermal battery. Electrical energy can be efficiently converted into heat and multiple options are available to store it. An overview of the high temperature thermal energy storage (HTTES) is presented below.

Alkali-metal carbonate salts can be used for sensible heat storage at high temperature. There are following three systems available for the purpose viz. Raft thermocline, two tank and two media thermocline systems. Latent heat storage is a lucrative HTTES option. Several metals such as Copper (1084°C), Ductile Iron (1149°C) and their alloys, e.g., Yellow Brass (930°C) have melting points in the target temperature range. Several common salts such as NaF (995°C), BaCl2 (962°C) etc. can also be utilized for HTTES. Excess electricity can also be stored by thermochemical process consisting of a pair of reversible redox reactions. In the charging cycle, excess electricity converted into heat is utilized in an endothermic reaction. The excess heat can thus be stored in the products of reaction for a long duration without any energy loss issue. When required, the stored energy can be recovered by initiating the exothermic reaction between the products of the previous reaction. This project will investigate the above options of HTTES and find the most suitable one from performance and
economic aspects to substitute electrical batteries for energy storage.

Outcomes

Successful completion of the project will deliver the following:

  1. Evaluation of the thermal performance of various HTTES media.
  2. Techno-economic analysis of development and functioning of thermal battery.
  3. Comparison (Performance, economics, safety and durability) between thermal battery and electrical battery.
  4. CFD analysis of critical components for performance improvements.
  5. Holistic optimization study of the overall plant to determine optimum operating parameters.

Information for applicants

Essential capabilities

  • Strong fundamentals in thermodynamics, heat transfer and power plant engineering.
  • Knowledge of CFD tools and Matlab, Knowledge of system design software.

Desireable capabilities

Experimental acumen.

Expected qualifications (Course/Degrees etc.)

Masters in Mechanical/ Chemical/ Aerospace engineering.

Candidate Discipline

Renewable Energy, Heat Transfer, Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Project supervisors

Principal supervisors

UQ Supervisor

Professor Hal Gurgenci

School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering
IITD Supervisor

Associate Professor Dibakar Rakshit

Centre for Energy Studies