Applications and technological challenges for heat recovery, storage and utilisation with latent thermal energy storage

TLDR

Thermal energy storage technology offers the greatest potential to balance demand and supply, mitigating the intermittency of real‑world heat sources and enabling more flexible, efficient, and reliable thermal systems. The article reviews latent thermal energy storage technology, focusing on medium‑high temperature phase change materials for heat recovery, storage, and utilisation, and aims to identify design and optimisation methods for LTES heat exchangers to bridge current knowledge gaps. Current work concentrates on moderate‑high temperature phase change materials and thermal conductivity enhancement, various LTES heat‑exchanger configurations and heat‑transfer enhancement techniques, and applications with solar, industrial waste, and engine waste heat sources.

Abstract

Thermal energy storage (TES) technology is considered to have the greatest potential to balance the demand and supply overcoming the intermittency and fluctuation nature of real-world heat sources, making a more flexible, highly efficient and reliable thermal energy system. This article provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of latent thermal energy storage (LTES) technology with a particular focus on medium-high temperature phase change materials for heat recovery, storage and utilisation. This review aims to identify potential methods to design and optimise LTES heat exchangers for heat recovery and storage, bridging the knowledge gap between the present studies and future technological developments. The key focuses of current work can be described as follows: (1) Insight into moderate-high temperature phase change materials and thermal conductivity enhancement methods. (2) Various configurations of latent thermal energy storage heat exchangers and relevant heat transfer enhancement techniques (3) Applications of latent thermal energy storage heat exchangers with different thermal sources, including solar energy, industrial waste heat and engine waste heat, are discussed in detail.