A pressure drop study for packed bed adsorption thermal energy storage

Abstract Adsorption thermal energy storage has received considerable attention as it can overcome the mismatch between supply and demand of renewables, providing high energy storage per volume. In the packed bed adsorption thermal energy storage, pressure drop is of key concern since higher pressure drop leads into lower energy storage efficiency. In this paper, an experimental and modeling investigation on the pressure drop inside the adsorption packed beds is performed. An accurate semi-analytical closed-form relationship is proposed to calculate the pressure drop inside a column of adsorbent materials, taking into account the Laplacian friction, as well as the inertial effects. The model covers a wide range of porosity, between low-permeability medium, a dense packed bed of spherical particles, and high-permeability media, a pure viscous fluid. A modified permeability is defined to consider the inertial effect for a moderate range of the particle Reynolds number (0  p