Thermal energy storage based on cementitious materials: A review

Abstract

Renewable energy storage is now essential to enhance the energy performance of buildings and to reduce their environmental impact. Many heat storage materials can be used in the building sector in order to avoid the phase shift between solar radiation and thermal energy demand. However, the use of storage material in the building sector is hampered by problems of investment cost, space requirements, mechanical performance, material stability, and high storage temperature. Cementitious material is increasingly being used as a heat storage material thanks to its low price, mechanical performance and low storage temperature (generally lower than 100 °C). In addition, cementitious materials for heat storage have the prominent advantage of being easy to incorporate into the building landscape as self-supporting structures or even supporting structures (walls, floor, etc.). Concrete solutions for thermal energy storage are usually based on sensible heat transfer and thermal inertia. Phase Change Materials (PCM) incorporated in concrete wall have been widely investigated in the aim of improving building energy performance. Cementitious material with high ettringite content stores heat by a combination of physical (adsorption) and chemical (chemical reaction) processes usable in both the short (daily, weekly) and long (seasonal) term. Ettringite materials have the advantage of high energy storage density at low temperature (around 60 °C). The encouraging experimental results in the literature on heat storage using cementitious materials suggest that they could be attractive in a number of applications. This paper summarizes the investigation and analysis of the available thermal energy storage systems using cementitious materials for use in various applications.

Keywords

• sensible
• latent
• sorption
• chemical storage
• cementitious materials
• concrete storage systems