Engineering assessment of reactor designs for thermochemical storage of solar heat:

Abstract

Traditional heat storage techniques have a number of disadvantages for long-term heat storage, such as substantial heat loss and relatively low energy density (large volume).As an alternative, it is possible to store energy by means of reversible chemical reactions.For seasonal thermal storage by means of such ThermoChemical Materials (TCM), it would be convenient to have a system containing vessels from which the TCM powder can be fed to a separate reactor where the (de)hydration takes place.An inventory of potentially interesting TCM reactor concepts and a first engineering assessment of these concepts is presented here.