Thermal Energy Storage Technologies

Abstract

Energy, the lifeline of all activities is highly regarded to be conserved at every step of the growing engineering and the stupendous technological activities for ensuring the congruent economic development of a country. The gap present between the energy generation and the energy consumption keeps expanding with a precipitous increase in the demand for the energy, especially in the infrastructure and construction sectors. From this perspective, the incessant value-added engineering designs from the scheme inception to the construction are to be primarily necessitated, for enhancing the energy savings potential and energy efficiency in the new as well as in the refurbishment of building structures. Albeit there are several measures available to minimize the net energy consumption in buildings, there is still a need for an efficient system which can shift the thermal load demand during the on-peak to off-peak conditions, without losing energy conservative potential. In this context, the thermal energy storage (TES) systems are primarily intended for enhancing the performance of the cooling and heating systems in terms of storing and releasing heat energy on short-term or diurnal or seasonal basis, depending on the thermal load requirements experienced in buildings. The incorporation of renewable energy-based seasonal TES systems can collectively contribute for achieving enhanced energy performance on a long term, which would take forward the new and the existing building refurbishment designs towards the nearly zero-energy concepts.