Novel Controllable High Performance Thermal Storage and Heat Transfer Systems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Canada's abundant energy supply has led to a significant reliance on energy to sustain our quality of life and to power our key industrial sectors. Given the rising cost and demand for energy worldwide as well as the growing concern over the role that fossil fuels play in both climate change and health risks, there is an urgent need to develop cleaner and sustainable alternatives as part of Canada's energy strategy. Thermal energy conversion and management is a core technology that can be applied to numerous applications, including the capture of waste heat from energy systems, vehicles and commercial or industrial processes. These systems hold enormous potential to augment conventional energy sources in the short term and to revolutionize the way we produce energy in the future. This research is motivated by a critical need for novel devices and systems to capture this "lost" energy. Combining scientific expertise, exploratory research and enabling technologies, the objective of this research program is to develop solutions that are urgently required to overcome the technological barriers that are preventing advanced concepts from being translated into systems that can meet society's needs. This includes the development of expertise in two-phase thermal management systems, new heat exchanger designs and advanced thermal storage solutions by establishing electrohydrodynamics (EHD) as the mechanism of enhancement and intelligent control. The EHD principle involves interaction of an applied electric field with a fluid medium to induce electric body forces on the fluid, and set the fluid in motion. This impact then provides the ability to significantly enhance heat transfer as well as the ability to control it. The long term research goal will be to establish analytical methods and design guidelines to facilitate the wide scale employment of these novel systems in order to maximize the potential of the EHD effect. The resulting knowledge will provide HQP with the methods and tools to integrate existing thermal management and conversion systems with these critically needed novel technologies, turning waste heat into useable energy.