Optimal design with materials selection for thermal energy storages in high temperature concentrating solar power

Abstract

This study proposes a comprehensive decision support framework to optimally select the solid medium and heat transfer tubes material composing the thermal energy storage (TES). The proposed decision model aims to maximise the net present value (NPV) associated with the TES investment over a given time horizon. Compared with related works in the literature, the authors’ design accounts for various practical investment costs and design parameters that are the number of heat transfer tubes, storage module length, and the storage unit diameter. The decision problem, which maximises the NPV is formulated as an optimisation problem to find out the optimal combination among a set of solid media and heat transfer tube materials considering their thermo-physical characteristics. The proposed design is evaluated through case studies to test its concrete practices and to evaluate the impacts of the design parameters on the TES investment costs.