To support the transition to fossil free society and economy, energy storage and particularly heat storage has been identified as a strategic technology. Heat Storage is a technology to stock thermal energy by heating or cooling a storage medium, the stored energy being used at a later time for heating and cooling applications and power generation.
These systems can be used particularly in buildings and industrial processes. In these applications, approximately half of the energy consumed is in the form of thermal energy, the demand for which may vary during any given day and from one day to the next.
These apparatus can help balance energy demand and supply on a daily, weekly and even seasonal basis. They can also reduce peak demand, energy consumption, CO2 emissions and costs, while increasing overall efficiency of energy systems. Furthermore, the conversion and storage of variable renewable energy in the form of thermal energy can also help increase the share of renewables in the energy mix. In this project, we propose to develop a new technology and build a cost effective and compact thermochemical heat storage system based on ammonia salts, thanks to the heat which can be stored and recovered from the desorption and absorption of the ammonia into the salts.
To rationally design such a system and obtain high efficiency and long life time, careful characterization of the change in the ammonia salts during the ammonia cycling is needed. Indeed the ammonia cycling induces volume changes and create porous structures within the bed of salts inside of the apparatus. For such characterization, neutrons imaging technics are especially well suited as they can reveal information from the atomic scale up to the system level.
The knowledge acquired will be crucial to rationally design apparatus of increased efficiency and prolonged life time. Three academic institutions, IFE (Norway) for the neutrons studies, KTH (Sweeden) for the reactor design and DTU (Denmark) for the material characterization and synthesis, together with AMMINEX Emissions Technology (Denmark) as industrial partner are parts of the project.
