Numerical investigation of Ultra-high temperature electrical thermal energy storage system integrated with sCO2 power cycle

An energy storage (ES) system is an economical and reliable technology that plays a predominant role in making the renewable energy sector sustainable. Integration of ES with wind and solar plants provides solution to problem of grid instability caused by to fluctuating power output. The Thermal Energy Storage (TES) system is simple and has low environmental and social impacts compared to other ES technologies like batteries, pumped hydro, compressed air and chemical storage. However, application of a TES at high temperatures is quite unexplored and has a limited deployment globally.
Solid sensible TES (STES) stores excess electricity in form of sensible heat, the solid medium is directly electrical heated or indirectly heated using heat transfer fluids (HTF). In STES systems, no phase change nor chemical reactions involved. Hence, it is simple, easy to maintain and the cost of construction materials is low. The aforesaid advantages make it suitable for high temperature applications provided the solid material selected exhibits higher temperature stability.
In the current study, indirect heating via Heat transfer fluid is considered and various solid mediums at different geometrical patterns are considered. The One-dimensional Model is developed in Matlab for the preliminary study and further optimization will be carried out using numerical analysis in ANSYS CFX.

This study will enable the thermal and economical assessment of SSTES systems and their application in Power to heat to Power systems. The study is focused on the integration of TEs systems into power cycles specifically with supercritical carbon dioxide power cycles.