Read more
Due to climatic change, increasing thermal loads in
buildings and rising living standards, comfort
cooling in buildings is becoming increasingly
important and the demand for comfort cooling is
expanding very quickly around the world. The
increased cooling demand results in a peak in
electrical power demand during the hottest summer
hours. This peak presents new challenges and
uncertainties to electricity utilities and their
customers.
Cool thermal storage systems have not only the
potential to become one of the primary solutions to
the electrical power imbalance between production
and demand, but also shift cooling energy use to off-
peak periods and avoid peak demand charges. It
increases the possibilities of utilizing renewable
energy sources and waste heat for cooling
generation.
Phase Change Materials (PCMs) used for cool
storage has obtained considerable attention, since
they can be designed to melt and freeze at a
selected temperature and have shown a promising
ability to reduce the size of storage systems
compared with a sensible heat storage system because
they use the latent heat of the storage medium for
thermal energy storage.
