SPP 2403:  Carnot Batteries: Inverse Design from Markets to Molecules

• Subject Area: Thermal Engineering/Process Engineering ; Computer Science, Systems and Electrical Engineering ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: since 2023
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 500600620

The inexpensive, location-independent, and resource-saving storage of electrical energy is the central unsolved problem in the transition to fluctuating energy sources. One possible solution would be the emerging technology of Carnot batteries (CBs), where electrical energy is converted into heat by high-temperature heat pumps, which are then stored in inexpensive materials such as water, stones, or molten salts, and then converted back into electrical energy as needed, e.g., by means of steam turbines. The thermodynamic principle has been known for a long time, nevertheless there are so far no general methods for their design or their evaluation based on the fundamentals and the objectives. Carnot batteries are complex coupled, time-varying systems with a large number of components and degrees of freedom. Published efficiencies and costs are rarely verified or apply only to specific systems; integration into future energy markets is unexplored. The fundamentally new approach of this priority program (SPP) is the comprehensive inverse top-down design methodology, which, starting from the target variables (market) step by step towards the smaller, aims at the optimal design as well as optimal modes of operation, with corresponding cycles, storages, machines, and fluids (molecule), and in turn optimally combines these components - which have not been considered so far. Especially the working fluids and their mixtures are co-optimized with the process configurations and process parameters to find the technical and economical limits. The market needs and the limits of CBs is to be investigated by an interdisciplinary SPP team. By building up a new interdisciplinary community, a high methodological and content-related gain in knowledge is expected, which is transferable to further energy-technological questions. This will be done in the inversely arranged project areas, which build on each other and cooperate intensely: A - Carnot batteries in energy markets, B - Design of Carnot batteries, C - Components for Carnot batteries. The work of the SPP will be pooled and validated by a shared Carnot battery laboratory, which will be set-up within the coordination project and can be used by the participants of the SPP for validation of their models and for investigating the coupling of different interconnected parts of a CB. The cooperation and exchange between the participants will be coordinated, by organizing workshops, student exchanges, seminars, and includes the involvement of internationally renowned scientists from different disciplines. The management of research data will be facilitated and managed by the coordination project, as well as the communication of the results to the public.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes

Projects

• Agent-based Inverse Analysis of Market Potentials for Carnot Batteries considering Uncertain Energy System Pathways (AIM for Carnot) (Applicant Fichtner, Wolf )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Atakan, Burak )
• Development of Helmholtz-Energy based Multi-Parameter Property-Models for New Binary and Multinary Working-Fluid Mixtures (Applicants Span, Roland ;  Thol, Ph.D., Monika )
• Ericsson Battery – Conception of an Ericsson Pumped Thermal Energy Storage System (Applicant Thomas, Christiane )
• Flexible Inverse Design of Carnot-Batteries with Fluid Mixtures: A combined theoretical-experimental approach (Applicant Atakan, Burak )
• Heat transfer in packed bed thermal energy storage with low Prandtl number fluid (Applicant Niedermeier, Klarissa )
• Identification and characterisation of non-flammable and low-GWP fluid mixtures for thermodynamic cycles in Carnot Batteries (Applicant Brüggemann, Dieter )
• Inverse aerodynamic design of turbo components for Carnot batteries by means of physics informed networks enhanced by generative learning (Applicants Gottschalk, Hanno ;  di Mare, Francesca )
• Inverse design of turbomachines using transfer functions Sub-project related to the priority program "Carnot Batteries: Inverse Design from Market to Molecules" (Applicant Brillert, Dieter )
• Inverse design tool for rotary positive displacement machines with liquid injection (Applicant Brümmer, Andreas )
• Linking dynamics and equilibrium thermodynamics: entropy scaling and density scaling of siloxane mixtures and other working fluids for Carnot batteries (Applicant Vrabec, Jadran )
• Modelling of Carnot Batteries with Latent Thermal Energy Storages (Applicant Stephan, Peter )
• Multi-Objective Optimisation for the Inverse Analysis of Design Requirements for Carnot Batteries from an Energy System Perspective (MOIn Carnot) (Applicant Bertsch, Valentin )
• MultiPCM – Multi-Scale Simulation of Latent Heat Storage for the inverse design of Carnot Batteries (Applicants Thess, André ;  Vandersickel, Annelies )
• Parasitic heat transport in thermal energy storage for Carnot batteries (Applicant Cierpka, Christian )
• Prediction and surrogate modelling of thermodynamics properties of mixtures with application to the inverse design under uncertainty (Applicants Raabe, Gabriele ;  Römer, Ulrich )
• Ruths energy storage system design methodology (Applicants Kabelac, Stephan ;  Niepelt, Raphael )
• Scalable virtual test bench for the integrated design and control of heat pumps and thermal storage in Carnot Batteries: Smooth (Applicants Müller, Dirk ;  Vering, Christian )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Burak Atakan