Advances in phase change materials for thermal solar power plants quality

Abstract

Thermal solar energy offers a huge opportunity to reduce fuel dependency and environmental impact created by fossil fuel consumption. One of the main disadvantages of this renewable energy is its intermittence which decreases thermal solar power plants performance. In order to reduce cost electricity is necessary to create thermal solar plants which include thermal storage. There are different options of thermal storage: sensible, latent and chemical heat. It has been demonstrated that latent heat could store large amount of energy per unit mass. Moreover, latent heat storage could store fusion heat at a constant temperature which is the phase transition temperature of the phase change materials (PCM). However, these materials have a critical limitation that needs to be resolved in order to reduce operation cost of solar plants. This limitation is their low heat conductivity. This paper gathers the main solutions that are being analyzed in order to increase the possibilities to use PCMs in a high temperature thermal storage that is essential to develop optimum thermal solar power plants.