Research activities

Heat storage

Context

The building accounts for 46% of the total energy consumption produced in France and 19% of greenhouse gas emissions. As part of the energy transition, the storage of heat in buildings is essential in order to:

  • rationalize energy management at the building / neighborhood / city level,
  • increase the share of renewable energy used in the building.

Storage systems often arise from innovative assemblies of materials and functional systems giving rise to increasingly complex technologies. Thus, it is necessary to develop an approach to multi-physics characterization (experimental and numerical) and multi-scale heat storage systems to meet significant and growing needs in this area from an innovation and optimization point of view.

objectives

  • Understand, characterize and model thermal transfers in phase change materials (PCM) with or without radiation
  • Understand, characterize and model heat transfers in sorption storage materials,
  • Model coupled transfers in architectural composite materials,
  • Understand coupled transfers in storage reactors and model them,
  • Model heat storage at the building / neighborhood / city scale
  • Optimize building / district / city heat storage systems from a thermal and energy point of view.

Scientific skills

  • Development of Boltzmann type models on gas network adapted to the phase change in the presence of natural convection,
  • Experimental characterization of phase change, with and without natural convection,
  • Development of Boltzmann type models on gas network adapted to porous geometries,
  • Development of numerical and experimental tools for the characterization of the MCP air / wall convective exchange,
  • Analysis of air / MCP exchanger type storage systems, modeling and optimization,
  • Experimental reactor-scale analysis of sorption storage
  • Numerical modeling of heat and mass transfer taking place in thermochemical heat storage systems,
  • Energy and exergy optimization of thermochemical heat storage systems.

Some international collaborations

University of Lleida (Spain), University of Lüneburg (Germany), Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest (Romania), University of Auckland (New-Zealand), Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Concordia University in Montreal (Canada), Politecnico di Torino (Italia)

Some national collaborations

LOCIE (Chambéry), LGCGE (Bethune), LaTEP (Pau), IRCELYON (Lyon), LaSIE (La Rochelle)

Recent industrial partnerships

Dupont de Nemours, Cristopia, EDF, Lafarge, Saint-Gobain, CIAT, CETIAT

Participation in the working groups of the International Energy Agency

Annex 23 of ECES "Applying Energy Storage in Ultra-low Energy Buildings" Task 42 / Annex 24 of SHC / ECES "Compact Thermal Energy Storage: Material Development for System Integration"