Tools for Design and Scale-up of Solar Thermochemical Reactors

Summary

Need

Thermochemical energy systems (which use the heat from sunlight to provide energy to drive a chemical reaction) can have multiple uses. When used to produce fuels, they offer long-term energy storage that can be used on-site or sold as a tradeable product. When used for thermal or chemical processing, the systems can eliminate the need for fuel to provide a heat source, thereby reducing the use of fossil fuels and creating a marketable green product.

Project innovation

The Tools for Design and Scale-up of Solar Thermochemical Reactors project will produce the basic knowledge needed to design solar thermochemical reactors that can perform required energy conversions.

This knowledge will accelerate the development of thermochemical energy systems and enable new applications for concentrating solar power (CSP) including storage, transport and use with conventional fuels in large-scale power plants.

The project’s innovative approach extends existing techniques for computational simulation of other kinds of chemical reactors to solar thermochemical reactors.

It brings together specific expertise and capabilities from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory with that from two leading Australian universities to enable first-of-a-kind research.

In doing so it builds upon research already conducted by the US Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, using massive US supercomputing resources unavailable in Australia.

Benefit

This project will accelerate the development of solar thermochemical energy systems to exploit their applications for concentrated solar power.