Preliminary prospects of a Carnot-battery based on a supercritical CO2 Brayton cycle

Abstract

As a part of the change towards a higher usage of renewable energy sources, which naturally deliver the energy intermittently, the need for energy storage systems is increasing. For the compensation of the disturbance in power production due to inter-day to seasonal weather changes, a long-term energy storage is required. In the spectrum of storage systems, one out of a few geographically independent possibilities is the use of heat to store electricity, so-called Carnot-batteries. This paper presents a Pumped Thermal Energy Storage (PTES) system based on a recuperated and recompressed supercritical CO2 Brayton cycle. It is analysed if this configuration of a Brayton cycle, which is most advantageous for supercritical CO2 Brayton cycles, can be favourably integrated into a Carnot-battery and if a similar high efficiency can be achieved, despite the constraints caused by the integration. The modelled PTES operates at a pressure ratio of 3 with a low nominal pressure of 8 MPa, in a temperature range between 16 °C and 513 °C. The modelled system provides a round-trip efficiency of 38.9% and was designed for a maximum of 3.5 MW electric power output. The research shows that an acceptable round-trip efficiency can be achieved with a recuperated and recompressed Brayton Cycle employing supercritical CO2 as the working fluid. However, a higher efficiency would be expected to justify the complexity of the configuration.