Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells 176 (2018) 150–156

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Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells

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D-mannitol for medium temperature thermal energy storage T

a,⁎ a b a
Ahmad Mojiri , Nikola Grbac , Brendan Bourke , Gary Rosengarten
a
RMIT University, 115 Queensberry st., Carlton, Vic 3053, Australia
b
Rheem Inc., 1 Alan St, Rydalmere, NSW 2116, Australia

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: D-mannitol is a sugar alcohol with a melting temperature of approximately 167 °C. It has been identified as a
Thermal storage phase change material for storing heat at a temperature range of about 150–180 °C. The outcome of the pub-
Solar energy lished research on its applicability for this purpose is inconsistent and sometimes contradictory. We identified
Phase change that there is a need for further study on the material to overcome such uncertainty. Thus we conducted a series of
D-Mannitol
thermal measurements to quantify its properties and suitability for a phase change thermal storage. Our dif-
Sugar alcohol
ferential scanning calorimetric measurements showed that the material has a melting temperature of 167 °C and
Degradation
Thermal stability fusion heat of 297 kJ/kg. However, our accelerated thermal cycling test revealed that this value decreases
logarithmically to 249 and 240 kJ/kg after 100 and 200 cycles respectively. The material shows a significant
level of sub-cooling in DSC measurement with a solidification temperature of approximately 110–120 °C which
can render the material unsuitable for thermal storage purposes. However, our secondary measurement with a
large quantity of D-mannitol shows that such level of sub-cooling is unlikely to occur in a macro-scale sample. We
built and tested a thermal storage system containing 3.8 kg of D-mannitol to investigate its performance in larger
quantities and evaluate the heat transfer properties of the heat exchanger mechanism in the storage system. We
show that the material releases significant heat when it is cooled down to 150 °C which means implies the
occurrence of solidification at a temperature above 150 °C.

1. Introduction phase transformation of a material, normally from solid to liquid, to

Global industrial sector consumes about 80 EJ of heat for thermal
processes per annum. This is mainly used at temperatures below 400 °C
[1]. Recovering waste heat or implementing solar thermal energy can
partially offset this, and thus reduce the carbon footprint of the in-
dustrial sector. Taibi et al. [2] suggest that solar thermal systems can
supply 5.6 EJ per annum to the industrial process heat demand by
2050. By providing a buffer for smoothing the renewable heat supply
and addressing the associated asynchronous production and consump-
tion of heat, a thermal energy storage (TES) system can play a key role
to successfully integrate solar thermal energy for industrial process heat
applications capable of operating at higher temperatures [3–5].
A TES system for process heat should be compact (high energy per
unit volume), low cost, thermally stable, and capable of providing high
enough charging/discharging rates to meet the thermal process re-
quirements. Sensible heat [6,7], phase change latent heat [8], and
thermo-chemical [9,10] TES systems have been investigated by re-
searchers for years. Among these, the latter two are capable of pro-
viding dense thermal storage within a narrow temperature bracket.
A phase change TES system uses the heat required for physical
store and vice versa to deliver heat. Due to the availability of a range of
different materials with diverse melting temperatures, this approach
has shown significant potential [11].
Sugar alcohols have been identified as potential phase change ma-
terials (PCMs) for a temperature range of 50–220 °C [12]. Many process
heat applications fit in this temperature range and consequently can be
fed by sugar alcohol TES systems. As another advantage, sugar alcohols
are not corrosive. This is very important because PCM based TES sys-
tems generally need a sophisticated heat exchanger to extract heat from
the PCM. Corrosive PCMs can significantly reduce the life of the heat
exchanger.
Coupling solar thermal collectors capable of delivering heat at
temperatures of 150–200 °C with a thermal storage capable of storing
heat at this range can be very beneficial. D-Mannitol (DM) is one of the
sugar alcohols with a melting temperature of 167 °C. Although it is an
artificial sweetener mainly used for pharmaceutical applications, re-
searchers have considered its applicability for thermal storage appli-
cations because of its high heat of fusion (328.8 kJ/kg) [13,12], high
density (1520 kg/m 3 ) [13], safety due to it being non-toxic [12], and
its relatively low cost (2.40 USD/kg). This has major advantages over

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: ahmad.mojiri@rmit.edu.au (A. Mojiri).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solmat.2017.11.028
Received 23 June 2017; Received in revised form 12 November 2017; Accepted 16 November 2017
Available online 22 December 2017
0927-0248/ © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
A. Mojiri et al.
pressurized water for that would require expensive and possibly dan-
gerous pressure vessels to remain liquid at around 180 °C and mineral
oils which is expensive with a relatively low heat capacity. DM can
potentially store heat densely at low cost [14], however, there is a lack
of consistency among the data reported for its thermal properties in the
literature.
Gil et al. [15,16] conducted a series of experiments with varying
initial and final temperatures and cooling rates of DM which resulted in
a lower melting enthalpy, 263 kJ/kg rather than 328.8 kJ/kg. They
concluded that this could be due to the inaccuracy of the equipment.
They also emphasized the importance of accurate temperature and heat
transfer rate control because of the polymorphic characteristics of DM.
They tested the performance of a TES system with 160 kg of DM which
underperformed in terms of thermal capacity storing/releasing about
200 kJ/kg and 100 kJ/kg of heat.
Barreneche et al. [17] studied the effect of DM polymorphism and
sub-cooling on its thermal storage capacity. They observed varying DSC
peaks due to the polymorphism of DM. Initially without any cycling,
only 1 peak with 247 kJ/kg fusion heat was present at 167 °C which
corresponds to β phase, however after the second cycle, an additional
peak corresponding to the metastable γ phase with an enthalpy of lower
than 238 kJ/kg emerged. The authors concluded that the poly-
morphism would not affect the performance of DM if the working
temperatures are within 135–175 °C. But we suggest that the significant
sub-cooling reported in their paper can be a major issue.
In simple terms, in the presence of sub-cooling, the material soli-
difies at a temperature lower than its melting point. A TES system made
of such a PCM will downgrade the thermal energy produced by e.g.
solar collectors. Such TES system needs to be charged at high tem-
perature and releases heat at a lower temperature. However, the pre-
sence of sub-cooling for DM is worth to investigate further. This will be
discussed in this paper.
The other concern is the stability of DM under thermal cycling and
long term exposure to heat. Solé et al. [12] studied this and concluded
that when the sample is exposed to air, the phase change enthalpy re-
duces from around 240 kJ/kg to 150 kJ/kg after 20 cycles and reduces
to 100 kJ/kg after 50 cycles which represents a reduction of 30% and
50% in enthalpy, respectively. A large drop in enthalpy is detrimental
to the performance of the storage unit. They repeated the experiment in
the absence of oxygen and reported no changes in the samples phase
change enthalpy. They declared that the degradation was due to oxi-
dation.
Rodriguez-Garcia et al. [18] recently reported that DM degrades
even in the absence of oxygen due to non-oxidisation browning. They
conducted thermal cycling and steady heat exposure tests using a
custom-made device and observed mass loss and colour change. They
concluded that removing oxygen from DM TES system will not prevent
degradation and hence this material is not suitable for storing heat ef-
ficiently.
Such level of discrepancy implies that there is a need for further
examination of DM stability under thermal cycling and heat exposure.
We aim to do a series of accurate experiments with DM to help draw
more accurate conclusions regarding its applicability to thermal sto-
rage. In this paper, we investigate its thermal stability under thermal
cycling using DSC measurement of micro-scale samples up to 200 cy-
cles, and try to quantify its degradation. We also show that the sig-
nificant sub-cooling occurs in micro-scale measurements but there are
indications showing that it doesn't happen in macro-scale quantities of
DM. Then we examine the performance of a macro-scale TES system
made of DM and a heat exchanger to examine the thermal behaviour of
such storage cell in real world conditions.
2. Method
We started examining DM with micro scale samples using thermo-
gravimetric analysis (TGA) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC).
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Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells 176 (2018) 150–156
In TGA approach, we measure the mass loss of DM as a function of its
temperature. We used a 2-mg sample at a heating rate of 10 °C/min
with a temperature range of 25–850 °C in a PerkinElmer's Pyris 1 TGA.
The sample weight measurement accuracy of the device was 2 μg. We
carried out this measurement under nitrogen flow to avoid any un-
known effects of oxygen.
We performed the DSC analysis using a Perkin-Elmer differential
scanning calorimeter (Pyris 1) exposing a DM sample and a reference
(air) to a designated heating rate for a temperature range from 25 to
180 °C. The upper bound of the temperature bracket was limited to
180 °C based on the TGA results to ensure that the sample doesn't de-
grade in DSC tests. We used 25-mg aluminium sample pans and 22-mg
aluminium lids to house DM powder.
The sample went through thermal cycling at accelerated rate of
50 °C/min. This high rate of heating was used to save time over more
than 100 cycles and we didn't rely on the specific heat readings at this
rate of heating. To measure the specific heat of the sample, we changed
the heating rate to 10 °C/min every 20th cycle and scanned its specific
heat. The time taken for each cycle at 10 °C/min and 50 °C/min was 37
and 8 min respectively. In order to make sure that the samples reach the
extreme temperature of 180 °C at each cycle, we held the sample at that
temperature for 2 min before cooling it down.
We analysed five 2-mg samples of DM in DSC thermal cycling. We
used a weight balance accurate to 1 μg to weigh the five samples. A
total of 100 cycles were completed on all samples, with the exception of
sample 4 which went through an additional 100 total cycles.
We altered the method to observe the effect, if any, the heating rate
could have on the sample specific heat readings. We conducted a
heating/cooling cycle at a rate of 2 °C/min on sample 5 and compared
its result with the results obtained at 10 °C/min heating rate. We
weighed the samples again after thermal cycling to see if there was any
mass loss of the sample due to any possible leakage from the sealed
containers.
DSC samples were micro scale test specimens in the range of a few
mg. Following the completion of the DSC, we investigated the sub-
cooling effect in macro-scale sample of DM using an industrial oven, a
beaker and a 20-g sample of DM. This experiment was undertaken by
heating up the sample to 175 °C as this would ensure that the entire
sample was melted. Then we placed the molten DM outside the oven to
cool down. We used a thermocouple to measure the temperature and
visually inspected the solidification process.
To measure the performance of a DM TES system, we designed and
built a full scale TES cell. Fig. 1 shows a sketch of the thermal storage
cell. It is made of an aluminium finned stainless steel tube encased
within a mild steel pipe. The finned length of the tube is 3000 mm
which is entirely encased by the pipe. The tube OD is 1 in. with 16 mm
high aluminium fins attached to it. The fin pitch is 2 mm. The OD of the
pipe is 72 mm. The diameter of the fins is slightly smaller than the
internal diameter of the pipe. Hence there is a gap between the rim of
the aluminium fins and the steel pipe. DM fills this gap and the space
between the fins. Two steel caps seal the cell and support the finned
tube at the top and bottom allowing the ends of the finned tube to
protrude through a hole for manifolding purposes.
The fin structure creates a large contact area between DM and the
tube that contains the heat exchanging fluid, therminol 66. This storage
cell can accommodate up to 12 kg of DM which in theory is capable of
storing about 1 kWh of heat at 150–180 °C. However, in this experi-
ment, we filled it with 3.8 kg of DM. Molten DM can travel along the
fins adjacent to the central hot tube to accommodate for thermal ex-
pansion and prevent the system from excessive pressurisation.
The whole storage cell is thermally insulated with 25-mm glass wool
to reduce its heat loss. Two RTD sensors measure the inlet and outlet
temperatures of therminol 66 into and out of the TES cell. The thermal
properties of therminol 66 were extracted from the manufacturer's data
sheet.
We connected the TES cell to the high temperature thermal testing
A. Mojiri et al.
system developed at RMIT University [19] which is capable of mea-
suring the performance of thermal systems up to 250 °C. The testing
system feeds the TES cell with a hot fluid (here therminol 66) at a
controlled temperature and flow rate. The temperature of the fluid is
controlled by a 4-kW in-line heater that uses a Brainchild BTC-9300
controller.
The flow rate was controlled by a Labview PID controller driving a T
MAG-M variable speed high temperature pump. A Micromotion F025A
Coriolis flow meter monitors the mass flow rate with an accuracy of ±
0.075%. The RTDs measuring the inlet and outlet temperature of the
TES cell were PT100 4-wire RTDs with an accuracy of ± 0.19 °C at
150–180 °C. A simplified schematic of the testing system is presented in
Fig. 2.
We designed this experiment to measure the thermal capacity of the
TES cell to store heat in 150–180 °C temperature bracket as well as its
charging and discharging rates. The charging phase was carried out
using therminol 66 at elevated temperature flowing through the finned
tube at the centreline of the storage cell. The inlet temperature of the oil
was set to be steady at 180 °C. During this phase, we monitored the
inlet-outlet temperature difference and once it reached a steady state,
we assumed that the charging phase was complete.
Upon the completion of the charging cycle, the discharge phase
started immediately by lowering the inlet temperature of the working
fluid to 150 °C. The inlet temperature reached 150 °C in 900 s and was
kept constant as long as the Tout - Tin was greater than 0. Using this
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Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells 176 (2018) 150–156
Fig. 1. The geometry of the macro-scale TES cell.
temperature difference between the inlet and the outlet, we can cal-
culate the released energy from the storage cell. The total amount of
energy stored in the cell can be calculated as:
tend [s]
Q [J ] = ∫t
start [s]
(Q˙ discharge [W ] + Q˙ loss [W ])dt
(1)
where, Q̇discharge is the power delivered by the storage cell to the working
fluid and Q̇loss is the heat loss power from the storage cell to the ambient
due to non-ideal thermal insulation around the cell. We quantified the
heat loss experimentally through feeding the storage with constant
temperature working fluid at 130 °C, 150 °C, and 180 °C and mon-
itoring the outlet temperature. Once the outlet temperature reaches a
steady state, the input power to the storage cell is equal to the heat loss
from it.
The total heat stored in the TES cell comprises of the latent and
sensible heat from the PCM and the sensible heat from metallic com-
ponents of the TES cell. The sensible heat stored and delivered by the
metallic components can be estimated as:
Qmetal [J ] = mmetal [kg ] × Cmetal [J / kgK ] × ΔT [K ] (2)
where, mmetal is the mass of metal components, Cmetal is the specific heat
of the metal which is steel here, and ΔT is the temperature change that
the TES cell goes through during the discharge phase. The heat stored in
the phase change material (DM) has two components: sensible heat in
150–180 °C bracket and the latent heat of solidification. The total heat
stored in DM can be calculated as below:
A. Mojiri et al.
Fig. 2. The simplified schematic of the test set-up for measuring the performance of the
TES cell.
QDM [J ] = mDM [kg ] × CDM [J / kgK ] × ΔT [K ]
+ mDM [kg ] × hif [J / kg ]
where, CDM is the specific heat of DM, hif is the specific latent heat of
fusion for DM.
3. Results
3.1. Thermal properties
The TGA result of DM is presented in Fig. 3. DM doesn't lose mass
till its temperature reaches 207 °C. Beyond this point, it starts to de-
compose and lose mass. This finding is different from the results re-
ported by Kumaresan [13] in which they reported a decomposition
temperature of 300 °C for DM. Our findings showed a narrower window
between the melting temperature of 168 °C and the thermal decom-
position temperature. Hence, the heat exchanger of a DM TES system
should be carefully designed to prevent local overheating of DM in a
charging cycle. In the case of charging the storage with a high tem-
perature source (with above 200 °C), local overheating is very likely to
occur due to the very low thermal conductivity (0.2 W/m K) of DM.
Fig. 4 shows the DSC analysis result of melting and solidification of
a fresh 1.7-mg sample of DM before any thermal cycling. Assuming the
Fig. 3. The TGA results of DM.
Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells 176 (2018) 150–156
(3)
Fig. 4. The DSC results of a fresh sample of DM during melting and solidification.
melting temperature to be the onset of the curve, we can say that it is
168 °C with a fusion heat of 297 kJ/kg. The melting temperature is in
good agreement with other published data and our literature review
showed that there is no discrepancy on this, among different studies.
However, the fusion heat varies from study to study.
Sole et al. [12] have compiled a list of fusion heat values for DM
from the literature as 192/279/294/290/308 kJ/kg and our measured
value is close to the upper limit of this range. Such high value of fusion
heat is an advantage of DM because it increases the storage capacity,
however the cooling cycle of the DSC showed a significant sub-cooling
effect which is very undesirable.
The solidification of DM samples occurs at about 110–120 °C range.
This means that a TES system using DM as the storage medium
downgrades the thermal energy, i.e. the TES cell needs a heat source at
about 170 °C to be charged and releases the stored energy at a lower
temperature of below 120 °C. This leads to exergy losses. Should the
TES system be charged by solar thermal energy, the collectors must run
at high temperature that reduces their thermal efficiency. Hence, we
suggest it is important to investigate the sub-cooling effect of DM in
further details.
The solidification process shows two exothermic peaks that are lo-
cated in 110–120 °C range. The exact reason for the existence of such
behaviour is not clear. We hypothesised two possibilities:
• DM goes through a polymorphic phase change during its crystal-
lisation stage releasing heat in multiple phase transformation.
• The material doesn't solidify homogeneously due to non-uniform
temperature distribution and heating rate in the tablet.
More work is required to identify the exact reason.
The DSC samples are about 2 mg. The material is in a closed alu-
minium pan with a lid which press seals the container. This may cause
significant sub-cooling. Upon solidification, the viscous forces limit the
movement of the liquid into nucleation points of crystallisation. Also
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A. Mojiri et al.
the small amount of the liquid material at uniform state within a
smooth container with no physical perturbation such as vibration
minimises the chance of nucleation point formation. This implies that
the sub-cooling might be due to DSC sample configuration and might
not be as significant in a real world TES cell.
In order to verify this hypothesis, we melted 20 g of DM in a beaker
inside an oven with controlled temperature with an accuracy of 1 °C
and measured the solidification temperature using a thermocouple. The
thermocouple measurement showed that the solidification of a bulk
quantity of DM is very likely to occur at above 150 °C. However, due to
the nature of this experiment and lack of enough accuracy, we can't
provide an exact value for solidification temperature.
3.2. Effect of thermal cycling
Fig. 5 shows the melting transition of D-Mannitol which changes
with thermal cycling. The fresh sample shows only 1 peak at 169 °C.
With thermal cycling, a second peak emerges ahead of the first peak at a
temperature of 154 °C. This is assumed to be due to the polymorphic
nature of DM. However, there is not enough discussion on this phe-
nomenon in the literature. Since both these peaks are in 150–170 °C
bracket, DM can still be a suitable PCM for this window provided it has
a good thermal stability.
The reduction of DM fusion heat with thermal cycling is presented
in Fig. 6. The figure shows the average fusion heat of 5 samples over
100 cycles. We tested sample 4 for up to 200 cycles. As we can see from
the results, both of these curves follow a logarithmic trend and as such,
we are able to determine the longevity of the DM. We see that after 100
cycles, DM retains 85% of the initial heat of fusion. There is initially a
large drop in enthalpy of 10% after the first 20 cycles; however this
Fig. 6. The change of DM fusion heat vs the number of thermal cycles.
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Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells 176 (2018) 150–156
Fig. 5. The effect of thermal cycling on phase change behaviour of
DM.
drop reduces to 2.20%, 1.40%, 1.60% and 1.20% for cycles 40, 60, 80
and 100 respectively. This would suggest that the degradation of the
material reduces over time in a logarithmic scale, which is also seen in
sample 4 to some degree. Due to equipment limitations, running the
sample for more cycles was not practical at the time of running this
experiment.
There is a level of unreliability related to the logarithmic curve
presented in Fig. 6. Due to the lack of enough data at higher cycle
numbers, we are unable to claim that the curve will follow the loga-
rithmic trend beyond 200 cycles. The rate of heating/cooling had a very
small effect on the melting temperature and fusion heat readings. After
100 cycles, the aged samples showed a melting temperature and fusion
heat of 167.7 °C and 249 kJ/kg respectively at 10 °C/min. By changing
the heating rate to 2 °C/min, the corresponding values were 166.5 °C
and 240 kJ/kg. Such small changes don't affect the generality of the
readings for the purpose of this paper.
Heating/cooling rate didn't show any significant effect on the
thermal properties of DM. We assume that it doesn't affect the de-
gradation rate either. However, this is a null hypothesis that, due to the
excessive equipment time requirements associated with cycling at re-
duced heating/cooling rates, we did not investigate.
It should be noted that in this work, we studied the effect of thermal
cycling in a relatively controlled environment in relation to oxygen
content and humidity. There is a disagreement in the literature about
the effect of oxygen. Solé et al. [12] suggest that oxygen is the main
cause of degradation whereas Rodriguez Garcia et al. [18] have pre-
sented evidence opposing this argument. More research is required to
verify whether environmental effects cause DM to degrade. In our large
scale experiment, we minimised these effects by separating DM from
the environment using a sealed container.
3.3. Macro-scale TES cell
The experiment was designed to measure the thermal capacity of
the thermal storage to store heat in 150–180 °C temperature bracket as
well as its charging and discharging rates. Fig. 7 shows the inlet tem-
perature of therminol 66 into the TES cell as a function of time. It also
shows the difference between therminol 66 inlet and outlet tempera-
tures which is an indication of the heat flow into/from the TES cell.
The graph shows a transition region to reach an inlet temperature of
180 °C. The inlet temperature was kept constant at this temperature for
about 4400 s to fully charge the storage cell. Once the inlet-outlet
temperature difference reaches a constant value, the storage is con-
sidered fully charged. This means that the temperature difference is just
due to the heat loss from the system. We reached this state after 6100 s.
Upon the completion of the charging cycle, the discharge phase
started immediately by lowering the inlet temperature of the working
fluid to 150 °C. The inlet temperature reached 150 °C in 900 s and we
A. Mojiri et al.
Fig. 7. The inlet temperature (Tin ) of therminol 66 to the TES cell as a function of time
during charging and discharging cycles, Tout is the outlet temperature of therminol 66.
kept it constant as long as the Tout − Tin was greater than zero. Unlike
the charging cycle, the discharging cycle didn't show a smooth trend.
This is due to the complex behaviour of the phase change material in
the cell during the solidification process.
The PCM shows a sign of cooling sensibly for about 1000 s and then
the solidification process occurs. This releases significant thermal en-
ergy which increases the discharge temperature of the TES cell. It slows
down after about 2500 s and the TES cell loses its energy delivery
power. After about 4200 s, the TES cell is depleted from energy deli-
verable to a 150 °C working fluid and the power associated with the
relatively steady state condition at the end of the discharge cycle (about
−200 W) is mainly due to the heat loss from the cell.
We quantified the heat loss experimentally through feeding the
storage with constant temperature working fluid at 130 °C, 150 °C, and
180 °C and monitoring the outlet temperature. Once the outlet tem-
perature reaches a steady state, the input power to the storage cell is
equal to the heat loss from it. Such measurement is presented in Fig. 8.
The heat loss from the cell at a temperature bracket of 150–180 °C,
the operating temperature of the cell, is about 200–240 W (for a 3-m
long cell). Implementing this value in Eq. (1), the total thermal energy
stored in the storage cell (Q) was calculated to be 0.44 kWh.
The total mass of the metallic parts in the cell was about 34 kg
which is mainly from the casing pipe. The mass of DM in the cell was
about 3.8 kg. The analysis of the results showed that out of 0.44 kWh of
heat delivered by the total storage cell, 0.14 kWh was from the metallic
parts and 0.30 kWh was from DM. The mathematical model (Eq. (3))
predicted that DM would store about 0.34 kWh if the phase change of
solidification occurs in this temperature range assuming a fusion heat of
280 kJ/kg (see Table 1). In the absence of phase change in this tem-
perature bracket, the sensible heat delivered by DM would have been
Fig. 8. The heat flow into the TES cell by therminol 66; HF: heat transfer fluid.
155
Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells 176 (2018) 150–156
Table 1
Thermal properties of DM; “DSC” refers to DSC results of this paper.
Property Value Source
Thermal conductivity 0.6 W/m K Xu et al. [14]
Specific heat (@150 °C) 1.3 kJ/kg K DSC
Fusion heat 270 kJ/kg DSC
Melting temperature 168 °C DSC
Fig. 9. The charging rate of the TES cell as a function of time.
only 0.04 kWh. This is a strong evidence that the significant sub-cooling
effect is not as strong in macro-scale.
The difference between the expected and actual energy delivered by
the TES cell may be due to the imperfect discharging of the storage cell.
Some energy can still be trapped in the phase change material due to
the thermal resistances of the heat exchanger mechanism (the finned
tube – PCM interfac e).
Fig. 9 shows the charging rate of the thermal storage cell at 180 °C.
It started at about 600 W and reduced logarithmically to about 250 W
which is the heat loss power from the cell. It is important to note that
this is the charging rate of the cell when only 1 m of its length was filled
with DM. in case of filling the entire 3 m length of the cell, the charging
rate will be 3 times more.
During the charging cycle, there was no significant evidence of
phase change in the system. However, such evidence is more obvious in
the discharging cycle (see Fig. 10). After the initial transition region,
the discharge rate peaks at about 200 W. Again, in case of filling the
whole length of the cell, the discharge rate will peak at a higher rate
(about 600 W).
Since the storage was a single cell, the heat loss is significantly more
than what can be present in a packed storage unit made of multiple
cells. In that case, the heat loss from each cell will be lower with the
help of higher packing factor. Only the exterior cells will lose heat to
ambient. Hence, we have overestimated the heat loss here.
Fig. 10. The discharge rate of the TES cell as function of time.
A. Mojiri et al.
4. Conclusion
We examined the applicability of DM as a sugar alcohol in mid-
temperature thermal energy storage system. This paper showed that
thermal cycling doesn't affect the melting temperature of DM sig-
nificantly but reduces its fusion heat logarithmically from about
293 kJ/kg for fresh sample to about 249 kJ/kg after 100 cycles. We
thermally cycled one sample for 200 cycles which confirmed that the
logarithmic nature of the decrease. However, due to equipment re-
strictions, we couldn't study the degradation effects beyond this point.
In addition to degradation, sub-cooling in DM could have been a
challenging problem in practical applications, but our macro-scale TES
system test showed that such sub-cooling is not present in large volumes
of DM as long as the temperature bracket of the TES system is between
150 °C and 180 °C. However, our macro-scale test doesn't determine
precisely at what temperature, DM starts to solidify but confirms that it
happens at above 150 °C.
We conclude that DM can still be considered for latent heat PCM
TES systems however the cause its degradation under thermal cycling
must be identified and possibly eliminated. Otherwise, it will be diffi-
cult to economically justify a TES system with short lifetime. In addition
to this, the degradation of DM when it is exposed to elevated tem-
perature continuously must be studied. Some materials breakdown after
constant exposure to high temperatures over the time.
Acknowledgement
We would like to acknowledge the support of the Australian
Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) for funding this work under Micro
Urban Solar Integrated Concentrators agreement (grant no.: 1-USO
MUSIC). We Also acknowledge the support of RMIT University and
Rheem Inc for hosting this research.
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