Abstract
This paper deals with the experimental investigation of transient behavior and thermal storage capability of a sensible heat storage unit. The former is designed to store solar energy by using sand as a storage medium. A cubic unit has been designed employing three configurations of embedded charging tubes to study the performances of the system. The storage material used in this experimentation (sand) has been characterized by its, grain size, density, and heat capacity. Performances of the thermal storage bed (including charging time, energy stored rate, charging energy efficiency) have been evaluated for selecting the storage material. From our experiments, we found that the number of charging tubes affects significantly the storage performances.
Highlights
The main factors that hamper the development of Thermal Energy Storage system (TES) are their less efficiency and high cost [1]
Though the sensible thermal storage has the advantages of high reliability, simpler structure and operation compared with the latent storage, the amount of heat stored depends on the specific heat of the medium, the temperature change and the amount of storage material [11]
The solar thermal system was experimented with three different configurations of the heat exchanger (4, 9, 12 tubes) and the temperature variations are taken during charging time
Summary
The main factors that hamper the development of TES are their less efficiency and high cost [1]. There are three concepts of thermal storage systems: sensible heat storage, latent heat storage, and thermo- chemical energy storage [1]. In sensible heat storage (SHS) systems, thermal energy is stored by rising the temperature of the solid or liquid, using the heat capacity and change in temperature of the material during the process of charging and discharging. Due to its good thermal inertia [6], sand, is one of the materials that’s used as a storage medium in low and high temperature applications [7,8,9,10]. The TES systems using solid materials as a sensible heat storage medium, is usually implemented by embedding heat exchanger tubes in the medium to transfer thermal energy to/from heat transfer fluid [3].
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