Material selection and testing for thermal energy storage in solar cooling
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Date
2013
Authors
Gil, Antoni
Oró Prim, Eduard
Peiró Bell-lloch, Gerard
Álvarez, Servando
Cabeza, Luisa F.
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Abstract
The goal of this study is to implement and to test a thermal energy storage (TES) system using different
phase change materials (PCM) for solar cooling applications. A high temperature pilot plant able to test
different types of TES systems and materials was designed and built at the University of Lleida (Spain).
This pilot plant is composed mainly by three parts: heating system, cooling system, and different storage
tanks. The pilot plant uses synthetic thermal oil as heat transfer fluid (HTF) and has a working temperature
range from 100 to 400 C. Two different PCM were selected after a deep study of the requirements
of a real solar cooling plant and the available materials in the market through literature
review and DSC analysis. Finally D-mannitol with phase change temperature of 167 C and hydroquinone
which has a melting temperature of 172.2 C were used at pilot plant scale. For both PCM, no hysteresis
was detected, and at pilot plant only D-mannitol showed subcooling even though both showed it during
the DSC analysis. An effective heat transfer coefficient between the storage material and the heat transfer
fluid (HTF) was calculated. For the same boundary conditions, the energy stored by D-mannitol was
higher than that for hydroquinone. Moreover, D-mannitol has polymorphism that needs to be taken into
account when the material is used as PCM, but experiments in this paper showed that polymorphism did
not interfere its performance as PCM.
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Renewable Energy, 2013, núm. 57, p. 366-371