Thermophysical heat storage for cooling, heating, and power generation: A review

The role of energy storage is to resolve the time-scale mismatch between supply and demand, which plays a key role in high-efficiency and low-carbon energy systems. Based on broad thermal demands, thermal energy storage technologies with high energy density and low cost tend to have greater market potential than the electrochemical batteries. Among them, sensible heat and latent heat storage have been commercialized partly and are closely related. This article presents a comprehensive review of thermophysical heat storage combining sensible heat and latent heat storage, to exploit the available sensible heat when using latent heat of PCMs and maximize the stored thermophysical heat or energy density. Performance evaluation is improved by considering transient and variable operating conditions. The universal technical characteristics and performance enhancement are analyzed. Moreover, the specific working principles, developments, and challenges for cooling, heating, and power generation are discussed.