Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Thermal Energy Storage Material Candidates with a focus on SIM type sorbents

Semester project
Spring 2024

Context

Within the European context, the heating and cooling sector stands out as a significant energy consumer, responsible for half of all consumed final energy. Notably, 68% of the European Union’s gas imports are dedicated to heating and cooling. Energy in this sector is utilized for various purposes, including space heating, water heating, process heating, cooling, cooking, and space cooling. A crucial imperative for achieving sustainability goals in Europe is the substantial reduction of fossil fuel utilization in heating and cooling applications. However, the integration of renewable energy sources into these systems necessitates innovative and affordable solutions due to their intermittent nature, particularly evident in solar energy. To address this, the development of energy storage technologies is crucial to compensate for temporal discrepancies between energy demand and peaks. To this end, sorbent-based thermal energy storage (STES) materials are often proposed as a possible way to achieve this seasonal storage, with a multitude of storage materials to choose from such as hygroscopic inorganic salts, adsorbent matrices and the more recent Salt-In Matrix type materials which are essentially a combination of the salts and adsorbents while overcoming their individual disadvantages. Therefore, it is critical to build an LCA model for the thermal storage system first, to understand which material can better store a given amount of energy, and thus it’s impact on reducing emissions and other impact factors. After detecting the key processes, impact reduction with system expansion such as integration heat pumps can be analysed-

A LCA model will be conducted through OpenLCA software. The work will be done in collaboration with the IPESE lab.

The project / tasks

  • Understanding the basics of the sorbent-based thermal energy storage systems
  • Detailed literature review to gather data on the chosen TES (Thermal Energy Storage) materials
  • Conducting the LCA for the use of different storage materials.
  • Detecting the key processes via the results, and carrying out the sensitivity analyses for different scenarios.

Skills

  • Understanding of energy concepts and life cycle assessment
  • Results interpretation and report writing
  • having a reasonable command of English
  • Course modules: Life cycle assessment in energy systems

Administrative

This project is part of research work in IPESE at EPFL-Sion. The project will be supervised by Sai Sudharshan Ravi (IPESE). If interested, please send your CV, with short motivation letter, to sai.ravi@epfl.ch.

References

  1. Aghemo L, Lavagna L, Chiavazzo E, Pavese M. Comparison of key performance indicators of sorbent materials for thermal energy storage with an economic focus. Energy Storage Materials. 2023 Jan 1;55:130-53.
  2. Mohapatra D, Nandanavanam J. Salt in matrix for thermochemical energy storage-A review. Materials Today: Proceedings. 2023 Jan 1;72:27-33.