Design and Evaluation of Experimental Thermal Energy Storage

Abstract

Use of renewable forms of energy like solar energy has been envisaged around the world to find an alternative to the depleting fossil fuels. But solar energy is intermittent in nature. To use solar energy round the clock, it is necessary that solar energy is stored through some medium. Solar thermal energy can be stored in different forms of storage like sensible heat, latent heat, and chemical heat storage. In this thesis, heat is stored in solid pebbles in the form of sensible heat. This presented thesis aims at design, fabrication and testing of a thermal energy storage, and study of thermal energy storage material. The initial design was carried out numerically using a computational fluid dynamics tool, ANSYS FLUENT. The selected tool is validated by an existing experiment. Further, an experimental test setup was designed at IIT Jodhpur for testing of different solar sub-systems including the thermal energy storage. Experiments were conducted for the evaluation of the designed system. Finally the experimental results are compared with simulation.