In current scenario, energy storage must play a significant role in stabilizing supply and prices. As a brief summary of the principle of thermal energy storage, when there is high renewable energy production, the non-consumable part of the production is used to heat a large mass of stone, concrete, sand. When there is low renewable energy production, the stored heat is used to produce electricity with thermal power plants. However, in practice, of course, it is not so straightforward to design a grid scale energy storage. There are plenty of opportunities for good research projects to gain useful insight in designing a large-scale thermal energy storage system and to investigate its performance.
In a recent work, a packed-bed thermal energy storage system of 175,000 cubic meter volume is conceptually designed and numerically investigated for high temperature applications. The storage is a underground, truncated conical packed-bed of rocks as a solid storage media. The results obtained from the work emphasis on practical design (shape and size) of high-temperature packed-bed storage for large-scale implementation.
The article is published in Journal "Applied Energy"and can be read here.
Investigation on transient performance of a large-scale packed-bed thermal energy storage