Importance of Thermal Energy Storage Pilot Plant Facilities for Solar Energy Research
Abstract
A pilot plant facility focused on testing thermal energy storage (TES) systems both at pilot and commercial scale was designed and built at the University of Lleida in 2008. This facility was designed and equipped with the measuring devices needed to measure and analyse the thermal behaviour of all the systems tested as a previous step to commercial development. The versatility of this facility has allowed simulating real working conditions and therefore testing different TES systems, mainly for solar thermal applications such as domestic hot water, solar cooling or solar power generation, but also for other applications such as industrial waste heat recovery or combined heat and power (CHP). In this paper the main characteristics of components of the pilot plant of University of Lleida as well as the main results of the tests performed with both sensible and latent TES are shown.
Keywords
Thermal energy storage, solar thermal applications, phase change material, sensible heat, pilot plant scale