RII Track-4: Understanding Reaction-Transport Coupling in High-Temperature Thermochemical Energy Storage Systems

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Non-Technical Abstract Solar thermochemical energy storage (TCES) has the potential to develop into a transformative technology that offers a combined solution to the problem of the depletion of fossil fuels and anthropogenic climate change. With chemical reactions that show both changes of matter and energy and material cycling, concentrated solar power is continuously converted into chemical energy that can be consequently used for power generation. TCES has the intrinsic advantage of the ability to provide energy upon demand and store energy when there is no demand, thus it can mitigate the intermittency and fluctuation of solar power. Although significant progress has been made in materials discovery based on thermodynamics and reactivity tests in well controlled equilibrium environments, their performance is shown to be far away from satisfactory as witnessed by low conversion efficiencies and substantial reactivity degradation over cycles. This NSF EPSCoR RII Track-4 fellowship project provides the opportunity for the PI's modeling group to collaborate with the experimental group in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan State University to investigate and understand the fundamental reaction-transport interactions in TCES processes that are essential for designing and testing next-generation TCES materials. Support from this project will also be leveraged to help recruit underrepresented students at Mississippi State University. Technical Abstract The goal of this fellowship project is to understand and quantify the fundamental reaction-transport coupling in high-temperature solar thermochemical energy storage (TCES) materials and structures based on the collaboration between the PI's group on pore-scale modeling and the experimental group at the host site on materials testing. A pore-scale model will be applied to simulate the reaction-transport coupling, and micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) scans will be employed to track the structural changes. The research tasks including pore-scale transport modeling and material characterization and testing over multiple cycles will reveal the fundamental reaction-transport interactions for state-of-the-art TCES materials. They will also establish the rationale and protocol for reactive material design, and provide quantitative prediction and experimental demonstration of new material performance. Through both computational simulation and experimental demonstration, the project will deliver a knowledge base for an in-depth understanding of the microscale chemistry-transport interactions in complex, non-equilibrium environments. The broader impacts of this project will provide guidance to the community for next-generation TCES material design and complete experimental protocol development to maximize the energy storage density. Moreover, while this project focuses on the understanding of thermochemical cycles for energy storage, the collaborative numerical modeling and experimental investigation of materials and structures are also applicable to a broad spectrum of other high-temperature gas-solid reactions such as those for solar thermochemical fuel production, chemical looping combustion, air separation, biomass/waste gasification, and steam reforming.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.