Publikationsrepositorium - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

Liquid Metal Batteries (LMBs) are a promising electrical energy storage technology, built as a stable density stratification of two liquid metals separated by a molten salt. Their operation has been proved only for small prototypes, in order to transfer it to the industrial scale full knowledge of the different phenomena occurring in LMBs is required. In this work, done at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, we focus our attention on the thermal phenomena that appear inside Li||Bi LMBs . The system is first analyzed in the framework of the electrochemistry, a simple voltage model is developed and the heat generation terms are estimated. The geometrical and operating parameters are fully defined from multi-physics considerations. Then LMBs are studied with the continuum mechanics approach and all possible thermal phenomena are discussed. In the hypothesis of pure heat conduction, the first assessment of the effects of the reversible heat generation was done. Moreover the multiphase solver multiphaseInterFOAM is extended in order to take into account the thermal convection inside the cell. The results of our solver are compared to the one of a pseudo-spectral code. Finally some simulation results of thermal convection in LMBs are proposed.