Abstract
Over the past several decades, much attention has been given to the development of technologies utilizing solar energy to generate inexpensive and clean heat for heating purposes of buildings and even for electricity generation in the concentrating solar thermal power (CSTP) plants. However, unlike conventional heatgenerating technologies consuming coal, natural gas, and oil, heat produced by solar energy is intermittent because it is significantly affected by daily (day-night) and seasonal fluctuations in solar insolation. This fact issues a considerable challenge to the adoption of solar energy as one of the main renewable heat sources in the future. Therefore, along with the development of the different solar technologies, the heat storage technologies have also been the focus of attention. Use of the storage devices, able to accumulate heat, enables not only enhance the performance of the heating systems based on solar energy but also make them more reliable. This paper gives an overview of the various sensible heat storage technologies used in tandem with the fluctuating solar heat sources.
Highlights
Waste heat from combined heat and power (CHP) units in biogas plants and solar collectors are examples of the renewable heat sources, which can be used more efficiently when the heat storage is applied [1,2,3,4]
As shown in [15, 42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51], HT heat storage in packed rock bed employed in air-based concentrating solar thermal power (CSTP) plants has some technical and economic advantages over other HT heat storage technologies: (i) low investment cost, (ii) high heat transfer rate because of the direct contact between heat transfer fluid (HTF) and rocks, (iii) higher efficiency because costly heat exchanger separating solar loop filled with HTF from storage container in not needed, (iii) simple and compact storage unit
Many factors influence the selection of the appropriate heat storage method
Summary
Waste heat from combined heat and power (CHP) units in biogas plants and solar collectors are examples of the renewable heat sources, which can be used more efficiently when the heat storage is applied [1,2,3,4]. Concerning needed temperature level, the heat storage technology can be exploited for [1,2,3,4]: § High-temperature (HT) heat storage, when the temperature of the stored heat is above 200 °C In this case, the stored heat has the greatest energy potential and can be used as a backup heat source to support power generation in the concentrating solar thermal power plants and even some industrial processes, e.g. plastic molding, rubber and polymer vulcanization, industrial pasteurization and sterilization etc. Different types of concrete and castable ceramics with improved properties were developed to allow a heat storage system operate in HT range of 500 °C-565 °C suitable for CSTP plants, industrial waste heat recovery, thermal management of decentralized CHP systems and other HT processes [25].
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