The use of concentrated solar thermal energy for the production of electricity has been achieved commercially with the generation of steam in trough or tower concentrating systems. More recently, solar power stations such as the AndaSol 1 have also included 1,010 MW·h of heat storage, enough to run the turbine for about 7.5 hours at full-load. The thermal storage in the AnderSol 1 solar power s...

Cross-plane thermal conductivity kth measurements of vertical stacks of FePt/C were used to estimate the in-plane thermal conductivity of Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) media that consist of columnar FePt grains segregated by thin C grain boundaries. FePt/C multilayers with varied repeat units and FePt layer thicknesses (chosen to represent HAMR media grain sizes) were measured using F...

Thermal oil has been used as heat transfer fluid in many solar thermal power plants, which also use molten salts as thermal energy storage system. Since the engineering of these plants is relatively new, control of the thermal energy storage system is currently achieved in manual or semiautomatic ways, controlling its variables with proportional-integral-derivative (PID) regulators. Once the pl...

Metal Foam-enhanced Cascaded Thermal Energy Storage (MF-CTES) has been proposed to solve the problem of poor heat transfer during heat exchange process, which is caused by unavoidable decrease of temperature differences. This paper conducts a theoretical study examining the overall thermal performance of STES (Single-stage Thermal Energy Storage), CTES (Cascaded Thermal Energy Storage) and MF-C...

Direct collection, conversion and storage of solar radiation as thermal energy are crucial to the efficient utilization of renewable solar energy and the reduction of global carbon footprint. This work reports a facile approach for rapid and efficient charging of thermal energy storage materials by the instant and intense photothermal effect of uniformly distributed plasmonic nanoparticles. Upo...

The use of a latent heat storage system using phase change materials (PCMs) is an effective way of storing thermal energy and has the advantages of high-energy storage density and the isothermal nature of the storage process. PCMs have been widely used in latent heat thermalstorage systems for heat pumps, solar engineering, and spacecraft thermal control applications. The uses of PCMs for heati...

PCMs have always been viewed as a suitable candidate for off peak thermal storage, particularly for refrigeration systems, due to the high latent energy densities of these materials. However, due to the need to have them encapsulated within a container this density is reduced. Furthermore, PCMs have a low thermal conductivity which reduces the useful amount of energy which can be stored. To con...

Interim plutonium storage for up to 10 years in the K-reactor building is currently being planned at Savannah River Site (SRS). SAFKEG package could be used to store Pu metal and oxide (PuO2) in the K-reactor complex with other packagings like 9975. The SAFKEG is designed for carrying Type-B materials across the DOE complex and meets the 10CFR71 requirements. Thermal analyses were performed to ...

Three different apple-carrot juice blends (60:40, 75:25 and 90:10, v/v) were prepared and treated with ultrasound with comparison to the conventional thermal pasteurization. Total aerobic viable count (TAC) were significantly lower in juice blends with lower pH (apple-carrot ratio of 90:10, v/v) than the blends with higher pH after one month storage at 4 ̊C. TAC were similar in ultrasound-treate...

Large-scale utilization of solar-energy resources will require considerable advances in energy-storage technologies to meet ever-increasing global energy demands. Other than liquid fuels, existing energy-storage materials do not provide the requisite combination of high energy density, high stability, easy handling, transportability and low cost. New hybrid solar thermal fuels, composed of phot...