Storage Efficiency of Cold-Crystallizing Long-Term Heat Storage Material

DOI

10.2991/ahe.k.210202.027How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Long-term thermal energy storage, Phase change material, Supercooling, Cold-crystallization, Erythritol

Abstract

Efficient and compact long-term heat storage material would enable effective utilization of renewable energy sources by balancing the long-term variations in production and consumption. However, current materials still require higher storage capacity, efficiency and reliability for large-scale use. Previously, we established that cold-crystallizing material (CCM), which consists of erythritol in a polymer matrix, can reliably store heat over three months without decreasing its storage efficiency. Heat is stored by cooling the melted CCM to deeply supercooled state (storage temperature at 0-10 °C) and released by heating the material to cold-crystallization temperature, which initiates crystallization (i.e. cold-crystallization). However, if the storage temperature of CCM was increased, stored melting heat would dissipate due to slow crystallization. This paper analyses cold-crystallization rate of CCM, in order to model and predict the storage efficiency at different storage temperatures. This was carried out by measuring the progress of cold-crystallization by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) under multiple isothermal conditions. The crystallization data was first analysed by applying Avrami approach, to identify the crystallization rate constant. Then, the Arrhenius and the Williams-Landel-Ferry (WLF) models estimated the temperature dependence of the rate constant. DSC measurements yielded a storage efficiency of around 0.74 in the tested temperature range. Time evolution of this storage efficiency predicted with the WLF model corresponds to the experimental data indicating that valid predictions of CCM’s storage efficiency can be obtained, when storage temperature and time are known.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Konsta Turunen
AU  - Annukka Santasalo-Aarnio
AU  - Ari Seppälä
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/02/04
TI  - Storage Efficiency of Cold-Crystallizing Long-Term Heat Storage Material
BT  - Proceedings of the 14th International Renewable Energy Storage Conference 2020 (IRES 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 186
EP  - 192
SN  - 2589-4943
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/ahe.k.210202.027
DO  - 10.2991/ahe.k.210202.027
ID  - Turunen2021
ER  -