There is much interest worldwide in energy storage, which is still currently dominated by pumped hydro. The new systems based on thermal storage (as opposed to chemical batteries and the like) that will be considered in this project show particular promise due to their relatively high energy density and the low cost of materials. This project will contribute to the body of work in this area that has been undertaken at CUED for several years and received excellent recognition, both nationally and internationally. It will link in to the EPSRC-funded Generation-Integrated Energy storage work.

The project aims to explore the range of working fluids and cycle configurations (especially transcritical cycles) for thermo-mechanical energy storage technologies and develop design rules based based on concepts such as power density and energy density. In the current literature, few working fluids have been compared in terms of their performance, and transcritical cycles have been relatively sparsely studied. This will be mainly computer-based, with cycle analysis methods coded in Matlab or Python.

Furthermore, the project will include developing accurate cost models for the aforementioned cycle configurations. This will enable cost-efficiency optimisation thereof.