Thermo-economic Multi-objective Optimization of Adiabatic Compressed Air Energy Storage (A-CAES) System

Abstract

Adiabatic compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) has been accepted as a promising and emerging storage technology due to its excellent power and storage capacities. Traditional A-CAES systems often store the compressed air in nature storage vessels, such as underground hard-rock and salt caverns, thus depending heavily on geographical conditions. This problem can be mitigated by introducing artificial vessels. However, the artificial vessels could be very costly since their construction requires a large number of steels, accounting for a large proportion of the capital investment of A-CAES. For a given output, the capital investment and the performance of A-CAES system are depend on the operation pressure of each component (compression train, expansion train, thermal energy storage tanks and artificial vessels). In this work, both thermodynamic and economic performance of A-CAES have been investigated through a multi-objective evolutionary optimization, and the four operation pressures from different components are considered. Experimental results show that the Round trip efficiency (RTE) is improved by 4.41%, the system total investment cost (TIC) is decreased by 4.55% and the Profit is increased by 8.91% compared with conventional A-CAES. Hence, the designed A-CAES is more efficient and more economic than the conventional one.