Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Operation of a High-Temperature Oxidation Reactor for Thermochemical Energy Storage

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/6682xc493

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  • The cost of long-duration energy storage poses one of the most significant limitations on the penetration of renewables into power grids. Thermochemical energy storage has great potential to reduce this cost through the use of a reversible redox reaction pair that has a high enthalpy of reaction. The chemical nature of storage has potential to translate to low cost due to greater volumetric energy density compared with electrochemical storage or even other methods of thermal energy storage. Thermochemically charging and discharging a pelletized metal oxide can facilitate a temporal and spatial buffer between the heat supply (i.e., solar radiation) and the heat demand (i.e., a thermal power plant). However, achieving stable operation of the reactor(s) remains a challenge for this technology. In this work, various process parameters and control strategies are tested on a 1-kW discharge (oxidation) reactor prototype, which exhibits a counterflow configuration for the reactants and can deliver a working fluid in excess of 900 ℃. Pseudo-steady-state operation was attained with limited use of supplementary heaters, indicating the capability of the system to be continuously run which can improve its value proposition for long-duration energy storage. With a working-fluid mass flow rate of 40 SLPM, first- and second-law efficiencies of the reactor are 32.5±4.3% and 24.8±3.7%, respectively. The performance of a typical Air-Brayton cycle is also evaluated using the experimental results as boundary conditions: With a working-fluid mass flow rate of 40 SLPM, first- and second-law chemical-to-electrical conversion efficiencies of this plant are predicted to be 10.9±1.3% and 12.0±1.6%, respectively. Because of the significant heat losses of smaller systems (due to higher surface-area-to-volume ratios), these metrics are all expected to drastically improve with scale-up. Operational flexibility of this prototype is also investigated by quantifying the impact of the parasitic startup on its runtime-dependent thermodynamic performance: Both short-duration as well as long-duration cyclic operation is shown to be potentially viable with this reactor prototype.
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  • The funding from the United States Department of Energy / Solar Energy Technologies Office Grant Number DE-EE0008892 is acknowledged.
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