Study of thermal solar energy storage using stationary batterers and melting salts technique

Abstract EN

One of the most problems encountered in thermal solar energy plant is the efficiency and quantity of energy storage operation, which is performed in the day and then use it at night and cloudy weather periods to increase the plant running time.

Two methods are used in this study for storing energy : First, the batteries are used for storing electrical energy which produces from a solar thermal plant.

Select stationary battery, which consists from three positive plates and this battery would have a storage capacity of (500) amp.

hour for one hour every day at 25°C (77°F) and (6) volt per cell with help of excel and MATLAB simulation program.

This storage is very useful in solar energy system.

The second method is collecting and holding the sun heat, which produced by concentrating solar power systems using materials that hold a large amount of heat and release it slowly.

One of these materials is melting salts such as Globes Salt (NA2SO4, 10 H2O) which used for this purpose.

Salt solidification model is performed by Ansys 5.4 program.

The results show that the storage in the first method is very useful in solar thermal energy systems.

Also the results show that the storage energy by latent heat of the melting salt is more efficient than that by sensible heat and (90 %) of the total storage energy in second method producing by latent heat.

Three parameters are affected on the heat gain from salt solidification, which are initial temperature of the salt, geometry and surface area of the salt container and the latent heat value of the salt used.