Evaluations of thermocline and half cycle figure of merit of a thermal energy storage tank

Two main criteria that are commonly used to evaluate thermal energy storage systems are thermocline thickness and half cycle figure of merit. For the thermocline thickness, the preference is to achieve as thin as possible the thermocline thickness. While the preference for half cycle figure of merit is to achieve the value of greater than 90 per cent. These two criteria were used to evaluate a thermal storage system at University Teknologi PETRONAS district cooling plant. The capacity of the thermal energy storage tank of the plant is 10,000 RTh. Operating data was used for the evaluation. The values of evaluated thermocline thickness ranges from 2.248 meters to 5.445 meters with an average of 3.251 meters. These values are very much higher in comparison to findings of other studies. One possible reason is due to higher flow rates. For the half cycle figure of merit the evaluated values ranges from 0.9469 to 0.9847, with the average of 0.9698, which are within the acceptable range. For future work a model should be developed which could automatically evaluate both the thermocline thickness and half cycle figure of merit. This would enable both of these parameters to be continuously evaluated. © The authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2017.