Abstract
For the current thermal performance of the concentrating solar power (CSP) plants, the thermocline storage approach in a packed bed is recommended to be a favorable thermal energy storage (TES) system because of its cost effectiveness. Based on this, several parametric studies were performed to examine the thermal efficiency of various configurations of packed bed thermocline TES schemes. However, the impact of inlet temperature fluctuations on the storage tank's thermal performance has not been studied. The main objective of this research is to analyze, examine and evaluate the charge and discharge control strategies under different meteorological conditions using different storage configurations. A two-phase dispersion-concentric approach is formulated and verified to analyze the system's periodic thermal characteristics. The results indicate that the hybrid sensible-latent heat storage (HSLHS) case has the highest capacity ratio, utilization ratio, recovered energy, and overall efficiency over the changing inlet temperature, which is equal to 85.2%, 82.5%, 150.7 MWh, 95.2%, respectively, at Tin = 565 °C. In addition, the findings proved that the overall efficiency improved by 19.2% using the HSLHS configuration at low temperature while it improved by 34.4% at a higher temperature.
NSTL
Elsevier