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High-temperature high-pressure calorimetry for studying thermochemical energy storage materials

University of British Columbia

Metal hydrides that can hydrogenate and dehydrogenate reversibly at high-temperature and high-pressure are considered candidate materials for thermochemical energy storage (TES). The thermodynamic and kinetic properties of these metal hydrides are poorly defined due to the limitation of the measurement techniques at high-temperature and high pressure. This thesis describes a custom-designed high-temperature and high-pressure calorimeter for studying gram-scale heterogeneous chemical reactions that expands the limits of TES research. Chapter 2 outlines the physical design and fabrication details of the calorimeter. The calorimeter was demonstrated operating up to at least 1232 °C while under pure hydrogen pressures up to 33 bar with simultaneous in-situ calorimetric and pressure measurements. A finite element analysis (FEA) model was constructed using COMSOL Multiphysics to aid the experimental design. Chapter 3 outlines a thermal analysis algorithm that is modelled with a lumped-element model. The chemical enthalpy can be estimated using this algorithm along with the power and temperature profile data from this calorimeter. The model was verified using an aluminum heat of fusion experiment, as well as an exothermic process simulation to obtain a fitting accuracy of over 99%. Chapter 4 summarizes this work and offers future directions of the research that can be conducted using this instrument.

Text

2019-10-01

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/71812

Chemical and Biological Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/