Research

We are going to have a seminar on 'Thermal Energy Storage Using Composite Phase Change Materials: Linking Materials Properties to Device Performance' on Monday 20th April 2015, 1-2 pm, given by Professor Yulong Ding, who is director of Birmingham Centre for Energy Storage at the University of Birmingham.

Abstract and biography are given below.

Date & Time:       1-2pm, Monday 20th April 2015
Venue:                Room 526, James Watt Building South

Tea/coffee/biscuits before the start.

 

 

---

Abstract

Thermal energy is at the heart of the whole energy chain providing a main linkage between the primary and secondary energy sources. Thermal energy storage (TES) has a pivotal role to play in the energy chain and hence in future clean energy systems. However, a competitive TES technology requires a number of scientific and technological challenges to be addressed including materials, components and devices, and integration of the devices within energy networks and associated dynamic optimization. This requires fundamental understanding of the underlying physics across a very large spatial length scale from atomic/molecular scale (10-10m) to system scale (10+3m).

This talk will first briefly outline the background and challenges of energy storage. Discussion will then be on TES covering materials, components and devices and system integration, with a focus on linking the materials properties to the system level performance.

TES can be sensible heat, latent heat or thermochemical based. This talk shall use the latent heat storage materials, often called phase change materials (PCM), as an example, particularly inorganic salts based PCMs for medium and high temperature applications. Two key challenges for such materials are chemical incompatibility and low thermal conductivity. The use of composite materials provides an avenue to meeting the challenges. Such composite materials use a structural supporting material and a thermal conductivity enhancement material. A right combination of the salt, the structural supporting material and the thermal conductivity enhancement material could give a hierarchical structure that is able to encapsulate the molten salt and give a substantial enhancement in the thermal conductivity. Our recent progress in these aspects will also be covered in the talk.

Biography

Professor Yulong Ding holds the founding Chamberlain chair of Chemical Engineering and Highview-RAEng chair of cryogenic energy storage and is director of Birmingham Centre for Energy Storage at the University of Birmingham. He joined Birmingham in October 2013, and before this, he was Professor and Director of Institute of Particle Science & Engineering at the University of Leeds. He was the founding director of the joint Institute for Energy Storage between University of Leeds and Institute of Process Engineering of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has significant track record in energy materials and energy processes and has a current research focus on developing novel technologies for electrical and thermal energy storage at different scales. He has been a PI or Co-I of research projects with over £20M funding over the past 10 years. He has >13 patents, >400 papers with >160 in peer reviewed journals (H-Index of ~ 45). He was listed as top 1% highly cited researchers with consistent impact over 2002-2012 in the engineering category by Thomson Reuters. Professor Ding invented the liquid air energy storage technology and led the initial stage of development of the technology. His work on liquid air energy storage made a major contribution to the 2011 ‘The Engineer’ Energy & Environmental and Grand Prix awards, and 2012 Rushlight Energy Environmental and Power Generation and Transmission awards.

First published: 24 October 2013