Innovative large-scale thermal energy storage for buildings and communities

Project Details

Description

A fully decarbonised European energy system must be equipped with very large flexibility capacities, enabling the uptake of intermittent renewable sources, coupling energy sectors, and increasing the energy system efficiency. The Alliance PhD project forms the foundation for the accelerated realization of large pit thermal energy storages (PTES) that serve as the enabler for fully renewable district heating networks and industrial heating systems. The focus of the project is to use synergies in order to improve cost-effectiveness through the targeted development of improved components and the collective improvement of design and building processes. Monitoring data from an already operating storage and from the demonstrators are used for better numerical simulation of actual and future system performance.
The research is funded by DTU as an alliance/strategic partner research project.

Key findings

The main objectives of the PhD project are to investigate the technical performance of water pit heat storage on a system level through detailed numerical simulations. The established simulation environment should serve as a virtual test bed to carry out preliminary studies on the demonstrators, as well as to evaluate the expected performance for a range of future scenarios beyond the scope of what can be tested during the monitoring phase. The project will address different system integration concepts and storage operation strategies based on known boundary conditions such as availability of different heat sources, temperature levels, as well as different tariff structures for heat and electricity. The simulation studies will be compared against monitoring data in the field in the latter stages of the project to test the model’s validity. The specific objectives will include:
•Establishing a workflow, tools and KPI’s to accurately model and evaluate the behaviour of a PTES integrated into a larger district heating system.
•Design and sizing of components i.e., PTES, heat pumps, auxiliary plants for future systems to optimize system performance.
•Derivation of optimal storage operation strategies for future scenarios based on selected boundary conditions and consumers.
•Evaluations of the technical performance on different system configurations (both demonstrator and future system configurations) focusing on both storage and system performance.
StatusActive
Effective start/end date01/01/202531/12/2027

Collaborative partners

Keywords

  • thermal energy storage
  • Large scale heat storages
  • Simulation Modelling
  • water pit heat storage
  • Phase change materials
  • System integration

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