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Abengoa, designer of novel concentrating solar power towers, is a participant in several new ARPA-E funded projects for storing thermal energy. Credit: Abengoa

Last week Eileen reported on ARPA-E’s new awards in rare-earth alternative technologies. This week I thought I would take a look at APRA-E’s $37.3 million initiative to find a disruptive thermal storage technology(ies), an effort cleverly called HEATS (high energy advanced thermal storage), all of which seem to have a novel material at their cores.

General speaking, the awards went to R&D groups working in three arenas: Large and medium-scale (utility-scale) storage systems, “thermal fuels,” and vehicular support systems.

In regard to large-scale awards, the quest is to find out if thermal storage could be used as a massive controllable and distributed load for grid stabilization. The technologies include supercritical fluids, molten salts, molten glass, metal hydrides and phase change materials.

The vehicular systems are mostly aimed at developing special “hot-cold batteries” for interior climate control to extend the mileage of an electric vehicle’s main battery pack. Some of the materials include PCMs, solid state thermal energy conversion materials and electrical metal-organic framework

Utility-scale HEATS

Navitasmax: Navitasmax, Cornell and Harvard Universities, Nano Terra and Barber-Nichols are getting $812,000 for a project, targeted at concentrating solar and nuclear applications, which involves evaluation of simple and complex supercritical fluids. They hope to show these fluids can be “tuned” to have very high heat capacity, which will provide the potential of developing low cost and efficient thermal storage.

Abengoa Solar: Abengoa Solar Inc. is getting $3.6 million to develop a new type of large-scale CSP conversion (salt?) tower and a novel thermal energy storage technology, which they predict can save 30 percent over parabolic mirror molten-salt system costs, along with higher performance. Abengoa has been developing projects based on new tower architecture, superheated steam and salt storage components

Halotechnics: This is a $3.3 million project by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne based on a low melting-point molten glass thermal storage system. Besides using abundant raw materials, the group predicts it can reduce costs by a factor of ten. It’s aimed at CSP and nuclear applications. The company, heretofore, has focused on molten salt technologies, but CEO Justin Raade says on its website, “We’ve been thrilled by the discoveries we’ve made with our molten salts and are very excited to explore the use of molten glass to reach even higher temperatures for more efficient energy storage.” It will optimize the material in order to develop a complete system to pump, heat, store and discharge the molten glass.

Pacific Northwest National Lab: PNNL’s Energy Materials Group and University of Utah will use $712,500 for a reversible high-temperature metal hydride thermal storage system exploiting recent breakthroughs. In particular, the team will try to demonstrate the desired cycle life in a reversible hydride and demonstrate an order-of-magnitude increase in storage density compared to existing systems. PNNL’s website says, “The team will first develop a metal hydride with a suitably long lifetime. If successful, they will then create a small prototype system.”

University of South Florida: USF and SunBorne Energy (a company that has tended to focus on India’s energy needs) have $2.5 million to develop a low-cost, industrially scalable system based on high-temperature phase change materials. They will use an electroless encapsulation technique (pdf) to enhance the heat transfer to overcome the low thermal conductivity of common PCMs. The proposed low-cost (75 percent reduction) system will operate at high temperatures with a small footprint. The idea is to prepare macrocapsules, from porous pellets of low-cost PCMs (salts, eutectics, metal alloys, polymers) and then encapsulate the pellets in high temperature material. Convective heat transfer would occur by submerging the PCM capsules in a liquid.

MIT: Like the project above, MIT and Boston College will use phase-change materials for high-temperature thermal energy storage. The team’s metallic composites-based PCMs will have high phase-change temperatures, high thermal conductivity values, long lifetime and low cost. The team intends to use its characterization and modeling skills to optimize the properties of these materials.

Thermal Fuels

University of Florida: With nearly $3 million, UF hopes to demonstrate a “thermal fuel,” a thermochemical fuel production system that uses a low-pressure, magnetically stabilized, nonvolatile iron oxide looping process. UF’s system uses a new dual-cavity, high-temperature chemical reactor that converts CSP to syngas with a process that uses water and recycled CO₂ as the sole feedstock.

University of Minnesota: UM, along with Caltech and Abengoa Solar Inc, says it can develop technology for a solar thermochemical reactor to make fuel production more efficient. With $3.6 million, the team is ambitiously aiming for solar-to-fuel conversion efficiencies of more than 10 percent.

Vehicular Storage

University of Utah: The university, with HRL and General Motors Global R&D will use $2.7 million to demonstrate a high-density thermal battery based on metal hydrides. The thermal battery will be used for warm and cold climate control to provide heating and cooling to electric vehicles without draining the EV’s electric battery.

PNNL: PNNL’s Energy and Environment Directorate, in partnership with the University of South Florida, will be pioneering an electric-powered adsorption heat pump for EVs. Researchers will use $813,000 to develop new metal-organic frameworks with larger sorption capacities and can be regenerated electrically. The PNNL website says a heat pump based on electrical metal-organic framework material the size of a 2-liter bottle could theoretically handle the heating and cooling needs of an electric vehicle with far less impact on driving distance.

TREATS: Sheetak Inc, with partner Delphi Automotive, received one of the largest awards, nearly $4,7 million. TREATS, thermoelectric reactors for efficient automotive thermal storage, would provide EVs with a new HVAC system option that can store the energy required for heating and cooling. Sheetak has a solid state thermoelectric energy converters to recharge a dedicated hot-cold battery. The converter can also eliminate the need for an EV’s traditional compressor and heater.

University of Texas at Austin: UTA and Sinoev will use $2.5 million for R&D for a hot-cold battery. They will demonstrate a high-energy density, low-cost system based on new composite PCMs with an energy density they say is two- to three-times above the state-of-the-art PCMs for low-temperature applications.

United Technologies Research Center: UTRC and Ricardo Inc will use a $2.7 million award to demonstrate a “hybrid vapor compression adsorption” hot-cold battery system based on a metal salt that has a high mass and volumetric capacity tailored to the refrigerant.

MIT: With the University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, Ford and $2.7 million, MIT hopes to demonstrate what it calls a thermo-adsorptive battery climate control system. This hot-cold battery would eliminate the vapor compression cycle, and if it works with EVs, it may be applicable to residential and commercial buildings displacing electricity consumption during peak demand times.

MIT: Based on its HybriSol Hybrid nanomaterials, MIT will use $3 million to demonstrate the use of nanostructures for high-energy-density thermal energy storage device. The HybriSol device would be rechargeable and transportable.

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University of Toledo professor Abdul-Majeed Azad believes a new paradigm is needed as the science community considers how to deal with the growing amount and threat of CO₂ in the atmosphere. Azad and his group of researchers believe that scientists are overly obsessed with sequestration approaches and need to broaden their thinking to include utilizing CO₂ for productive purposes. As noted in Ann’s post yesterday, the DOE’s NETL is starting to come around to this way of thinking, too.

Azad’s approach is fairly simple: If a humidified stream of CO₂ is run over the right catalyst, a mix of CO and H₂ (syngas) results. Then, there are at least two routes to beneficially use these products. One route is to send these gases into a solid oxide fuel cell stack to generate power and heat. The second route is to use the syngas as a precursor for manufacturing valuable organic compounds via a 90-year-old method known as the Fischer-Tropsch process.

Interestingly, Azad’s group has shown that if magnetite – an abundant waste product of the steel industry –  is used as the catalyst a reaction mediator, it is converted by the CO₂– H₂O stream into maghemite, a strong ferroelectric material that can be processed into magnets.

In this video, Azad discusses some of these concepts and he and his group show the operations of an small-scale demonstration of a CO₂-magnetite-SOFC utilization system.

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Grad student Martin Duran and Azad, right, working on the processing of nanoscale ceramic catalysts.

(the following is a guest post from Abdul-Majeed Azad, associate professor, chemical engineering, University of Toledo)

As we know, the ultimate chemical fate of the conventional fossil fuel combustion is always CO₂ and H₂O, two well-known greenhouse gases responsible for contributing considerably to the global warming. In 2007 the global level of CO₂ was 30 billion metric ton and is projected to be 43 billion metric ton by 2030. The United States contributes the largest amount - 22.2% - of global CO₂ emissions.

What if we could convert CO₂ into carbon monoxide (CO), water into H₂ and a mixture of CO₂+H₂O (the ultimate product of complete combustion of hydrocarbon-based fossil fuels, including biofuels) into syngas (CO+H₂), respectively? Syngas is a valuable precursor for the well-known Fischer-Tropsch process perfected by Germans during WW II to make synthetic fuels since Germany had coal but no oil reserves. All these streams (CO, H₂ and CO+H₂) are also ideal fuels for solid oxide fuel cells. Hence, essentially the waste products of combustion could become a fuel source and can be recycled. Alternatively, if desired, CO could be converted into H₂ via catalytic water-gas-shift reaction that then could become feed for proton exchange membrane fuel cells.

We have developed an inexpensive heterogeneous ceramic catalyst that we experimentally found capable of converting CO₂ and H₂O into CO and H₂, respectively, on a 1:1 molar basis, under mild temperature and atmospheric pressure. These streams when fed into an intermediate temperature SOFC at 650°C create an open circuit voltage, quite comparable to that of the same SOFC run with pure H₂.

The technology is also of relevance to NASA’s in-situ resource utilization program for MARS exploration since Martian atmosphere is ~ 96% CO₂. NASA might be interested in looking at our technology for creating CO from Martian CO₂ and, use it either as such or after water-gas-shift reaction to generate hydrogen as fuel for a SOFC stack. In the Martian context, to make the process truly self-sustained one could use solar concentrators to generate enough heat to raise the temperature to cause the desired conversion (CO₂ to CO to H₂). Thus, the fuel can be generated (and used) during daytime and stored and utilized to run fuel cells in the night hours.

It is predicted that global clean energy markets are going to quadruple in the next decade from $55.4 billion in revenue in 2006 to more than $226.5 billion by 2016. The approximate market size of this greenhouse gas mitigation is over $1 billion. The technology and the product are potentially of interest to energy producers and suppliers, utility chains, SOFC manufacturers and users, organic synthesis companies and Mars human exploration missions. The United States Department of Defense uses logistic fuels for its operations and could employ the greenhouse gas-fueled SOFC technology for many military field operations, including mobile forward base units, auxiliary field hospitals, field command posts, operational forays, and unmanned aerial vehicles. NASA is also currently looking at non-petroleum-based jet fuels in the pursuit of alternative fuels that can power commercial jets and address rising oil costs. A greenhouse gas-derived F-T fuel could respond to that quest.

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