The project is a basic study on the expected thermal behaviour of
gravel storage initiated as a part of a research and demonstration
gravel storage for seasonal heat storage.The goal of the
investigation is to determine the heat transfer between heat pipes
and sand-gravel storage media by carrying out in a small size
experiment. The experiment consists of a highly insulated box
filled with two kinds of sand material crossed by a plastic heat
pipe. Heat transfer is measured under dry and water satured
conditions in a cross-section.The conclusions are clear. To obtain
necessary heat conduction in sand-gravel material, the storage
media is to be water satured. In this case, handling of such
material on site is rather complex. The conduction is highly
dependent on the thermal properties of the storage media and so is
the overall thermal performance of a storage applying such media.
For sandy media no convectional heat transport is found. It would
be relevant to extend the investigation to media that enables
convectional heat transport. A last conclusion is that such
experiments, necessary for proper designing of sand-gravel storage
types, are a very cheap form of collecting information about the
expected behaviour of large storage systems.
Number of pages | 10 |
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Publication status | Published - 1997 |
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