Concentrated solar power is capable of providing high-temperature process streams to different applications. One promising application is the high-temperature electrolysis process demanding steam and air above 800 °C. To overcome the intermittence of solar energy, energy storage is required. Currently, thermal energy at such temperatures can be stored predominately as sensible heat in packed beds. However, such storage suffers from a loss of usable storage capacity after several cycles. To improve such storage, a one-dimensional packed bed thermal energy storage model using air as a heat transfer medium is set up and used to investigate and quantify the benefit of the incorporation of different thermochemical materials from the class of perovskites. Perovskites undergo a non-stoichiometric reaction extension which offers the utilization of thermochemical heat over a larger temperature range. Three different perovskites were considered: SrFeO₃, CaMnO₃ and Ca_0.8Sr_0.2MnO₃. In total, 15 vol% of sensible energy storage has been replaced by one perovskite and different positions of the reactive material are analyzed. The effect of reactive heat on storage performance and thermal degradation over 15 consecutive charging and discharging cycles is studied. Based on the selected variation and reactive material, storage capacity and useful energy capacity are increased. The partial replacement close to the cold inlet/outlet of the storage system can increase the overall storage capacity by 10.42%. To fully utilize the advantages of thermochemical material, suitable operation conditions and a fitting placement of the material are vital.

This article presents an experimental campaign on the transient behaviour of a packed bed, which is filled with spherical particles and is subjected to heating and cooling with air as the heat transfer fluid. The investigation focuses on a shallow bed with a diameter twice its height, a geometry alike to cost effective thermal energy storage systems, where the bed-to-particle diameter ratio is typically also large.