Verification of Simulator for Designing Stone Heat Storage Tank

抄録

An economical and technical solution in heat storage is a key point for the reduction of power generation cost of the CSP plants. A TES (thermal energy storage) system which uses the air as HTF (heat transfer fluid) and a packed bed of stone as the storage material have been developed in the previous study. This paper describes the experimental and CFD study on a TES system with packed-bed of stone using high-temperature air as HTF to be hybridized with CL-CSP(Cross Liner-CSP), which is an innovative solar concentration system newly proposed by Tokyo Tech. The numerical simulation is performed using commercial CFD software ANSYS Fluent and the validation is performed using a pilot-scale TES model. The influencing factors which affect the thermal stratification, such as the tank height-to-diameter ratio, the different stone size and the mass flow rate, are taken into consideration. As a result, the CFD simulation and experimental investigation show good agreement. The thickness of the thermocline is discussed for the CFD simulation result to evaluate the performance of a TES tank.