Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437

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Journal of Cleaner Production

journalhomepage:www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro

Thermodynamic analysis of a novel liquid carbon dioxide energy storage system

and comparison to a liquid air energy storage system
*
Mengjuan Xu, Pan Zhao , Yaowu Huo, Jianming Han, Jiangfeng Wang, Yiping Dai
School of Energy and Power Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, No.28 Xianning West Road, Xi'an, 710049, China

article info abstract

Article history: Renewable energy is difficult to utilize efficiently due to its intermittent. Energy storage system is commonly considered to be
Received 30 May 2019 an effective solution to stabilize fluctuations of renewable energy. In this paper, a novel liquid carbon dioxide energy storage
Received in revised form system (LCES) with two artificial storage tanks based on Rankine cycle is proposed. A comparative study is carried out
21 August 2019 between the LCES and the liquid air energy storage system (LAES) to evaluate their performance. Thermodynamic models are
Accepted 14 September 2019 Available established, then energy and exergy analyses are carried out for both systems. The effects of key parameters on both system
online 18 September 2019 performance are compared. Finally, the influence of the solar energy as a heat source on the performance of LCES is analyzed.
The results show that LCES has a relatively high round trip efficiency (RTE) and exergy efficiency compared to LAES, but a
Handling Editor: Panos Seferlis lower energy generated per unit volume (EVR). The RTE, exergy efficiency and EVR of the LCES system under design
3 3
conditions are 45.35%, 67.2% and 18.06 kWh/m , while those of the LAES are 37.83%, 45.48%, and 101.6 kWh/m ,
Keywords: 3
Liquid carbon dioxide energy storage respectively. However, for LAES system, the total volume of liquid tanks is 2493 m , which is close to the total volume of
Liquid air energy storage 3
LCES (2383 m ), because it need extra four tanks for cold medium storage. The solar fluctuations have little effect on the
Thermodynamic analysis turbine inlet temperature of the LCES.
Performance comparison

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
With the incremental penetration level of power generation from
renewable energy sources (Yang et al., 2016), energy storage plays an
important role in ensuring safe and stable power gener-ation due to the
intermittent nature of renewable energy. Among many energy storage
technologies, pumped hydro energy storage system (PHS) and compressed air
storage system (CAES) are appropriate for large-scale energy storage. PHS is
the most widely used large-scale energy storage technology nowadays, and
hun-dreds of PHS stations are operating with a total capacity of 127 GW
throughout the world(Yang and Jackson, 2011). Although the PHS has the
advantages of high power and high round trip efficiency, it is restricted by
suitable topological conditions, abandoned water resource, and long cycle of
construction.
CAES is another kind of large-scale energy storage technology based on
the gas turbine technology. It stores high-pressure air compressed by
redundant electricity in underground salt caverns,
expired wells, porous rock reservoirs, etc.(Chen et al., 2016). The compressed
cold air is heated in the combustion chamber and enters the turbine to expand.
These lead to the disadvantages of carbon dioxide emissions during
discharging and geographical location restricted for the CAES.
On the basis of CAES, many new technologies are developed in order to
break the conventional CAES technology restriction. Adiabatic compressed
air energy storage (A-CAES), a technology designed to abandon the use of
fossil fuels to extract compression heat and store it separately before
compressed air enters the cav-ern(Jakiel et al., 2007). Compressed air energy
storage with hu-midification (CASH) adds steam into air during discharging,
to increase both the round trip efficiency and output power level (Pan et al.,
2015), but it needs large amount of water and a huge air cavern. Underwater
CAES (UW-CAES) puts the air accumulator on the bed of deep water to keep
the stored air at a constant pressure. Since the constant air pressure makes the
compressor and turbine work at the design condition, leading to a high
turbomachinery efficiency (Pimm et al., 2014). However, long distance pipe is
needed, and the air accumulator is complex to manufacture.

In addition to various improved CAES, many scholars have tried to put

* Corresponding author. forward new thermodynamic layouts to improve the
E-mail address: panzhao@mail.xjtu.edu.cn (P. Zhao).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.118437
0959-6526/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
2 M. Xu et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437

Nomenclature ex exergy
hx heat exchanger
Cp specific heat capacity (kJ/kg/K) in inlet
3 out outlet
D density(kg/m )
E exergy(kW) s isentropic
h specific enthalpy (kJ/kg) turturbine
m mass flow rate (kg/s)
P pressure (MPa) abbreviation
Q heat flow rate (kW) A-CAES adiabatic compressed air energy storage
s entropy (kJ/kg/K) CAES compressed air energy storage
T temperature ( C) CCES compressed carbon dioxide energy storage
t time (s) CASH compressed air energy storage with humidification
W power (kW) HPS high pressure storage tank
HPC high pressure compressor
Greek letters HPT high pressure turbine
h efficiency (%) LCES liquid CO2 energy storage
ε pressure loss coefficient LAES liquid air energy storage
LPS high pressure storage tank
subscripts LPT low pressure turbine
com compressor MPC medium pressure turbine
cool cooler PHS pumped hydro energy storage
char charging process TEES liquid air energy storage
dischar discharging process UW-CAES under water compressed air energy storage

performance of CAES. Liquid air energy storage (LAES) is another kind of
cycle that can increase energy storage density by storing air in the form of
liquid phase instead of gaseous phase, which is not as popular as CAES. The
only research facility of the LAES was built in UK. The small-scale pilot
plant and results from the prototype testing were presented by Morgan et al.
(Morgan, 2015), and only 8% of round trip efficiency was achieved.
Subsequently, a 20 MW/ 80 MWh LAES plant performance was analyzed
based on the same prototype. The cold thermal energy store part was
discussed in detail, then the average cost analysis was carried out (Morgan et
al., 2015). A LAES system combined to a gas turbine power system was
introduced by Xue et al. (2015), and the best efficiency was ob-tained at 49%.
Thermodynamic analysis was implemented by Bernd Ameel et al. for an
energy storage with a liquid air Rankine cycle (Ameel et al., 2013). It was
pointed out that the energy density of LAES was much larger (about 20 times)
than that of CAES. Krawczyk et al.(Krawczyk P, 2016) analyzed the
influence of selected pa-rameters on the performance of LAES. The maximum
round trip efficiency could reach 57% after optimization. Khalil M et al.
(Khalil et al., 2017) compared the performance of liquid nitrogen and liquid
air energy storage systems, and concluded that using liquid air as storage
medium can greatly improve system performance compared to liquid
nitrogen. A comparative analysis based ther-modynamic between CAES and
LAES(Krawczyk et al., 2018) showed that the LAES demanded remarkable
lower volume than CAES, and both systems operated with high energy
storage efficiency.
However, the air critical temperature and pressure are 140.74 C and 3.77
MPa, respectively. This low temperature is a big challenge to the component
materials. Compared with air, CO2 has better physical properties, with critical
condition of 31.1 C and 7.37 MPa, which can be easily realized by the prior
liquefaction technology. Therefore, carbon dioxide is employed as working
fluid in power cycle and energy storage system in recent years. Mercangoz€ et
al. (2012) proposed a thermo-electric energy storage system (TEES). In this
system, transcritical Rankine cycle was employed, hot water and ice were
adopted as energy storage ma-terials. In 2016, Wang et al. (2015) firstly
designed an energy stor-age system with liquid CO 2, and two manmade
reservoirs were
used to store liquid CO2. An organic Rankine cycle (ORC) was employed as
bottom cycle to utilize the waste heat of turbine and then benefit higher round
trip efficiency. Thereafter, Zhang et al.(Yuan et al., 2016) proposed a
transcritical compressed CO2 energy storage (CCES) system, and the system
obtained a higher efficiency. But the CO2 storage was also limited by
geographical conditions. Zhang et al.(Zhang and Wang, 2017) conducted
comparative analysis of transcritical and supercritical Brayton cy-cles based
on CCES, and the supercritical cycle can reach a higher round trip efficiency,
at the same time, the system operating pressure is high.
In brief, the studies on the use of carbon dioxide as the working fluid for
compressed gas energy storage exhibits remarkable per-formance, but they
still have some limitations. The compressed CO 2 energy storage system
combining ORC as bottom cycle could result in a little growth of the
efficiency while increase the complexity of the system. Some are stored in the
form of gas, which affects the energy density. Some systems are still limited
by geographical conditions, and some others are operated under some severe
conditions like high pressure.
From another point of view, an extra heat source can be intro-duced to the
compressed gas energy storage system during dis-charging to enhance the
turbine inlet temperature, which can improve the output power of the turbine
effectively. As an inex-haustible green energy source, solar energy can meet
the heat source requirements of compressed gas energy storage systems and
will not generate carbon emissions. The study of solar thermal system
combined with CAES system mainly focuses on thermo-dynamic
performance improvement of system. A CAES system combined with micro
gas turbine and solar dish collector system was proposed by Mohammadi et
al. (Mohammadi and Mehrpooya, 2016). Energy and exergy were analyzed
and drew a conclusion that the RTE could reach 76.47%. Small scale CAES
combined with solar energy are widely used in distributed energy systems. A
combined cooling, heating and power system (CCHP) coupled with a CAES
system was modelled by Wang et al. (2018). The system was sub-jected to
thermodynamic analysis and economic analysis. The re-sults showed that the
optimal exergy efficiency of the system was
 M. Xu et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437
about 53.10% and 45.36% under the conditions of maximum heating and
maximum cooling, respectively. The thermodynamic analysis was
implemented by Ji et al. (2017) for a hybrid wind-solar and CAES system. An
organic Rankine cycle (ORC) was adopted for en-ergy cascade utilization.
The results showed that the combined CAES system had a high round trip
efficiency of 61.2%.
Despite some researches have been implemented on com-pressed carbon
dioxide energy storage in recent years, there are still many issues that need to
be refined, including geographic location constraints, and systems that are not
readily achievable under current technical conditions. Moreover, no one has
studied LCES combined with solar thermal system.
In this paper, a solar-assisted liquid CO 2 energy storage system (LCES)
based on Rankine cycle is proposed. It is designed to improve the utilization
of renewable energy, and to stabilize the instability and intermittence of
renewable energy. When there is a surplus in electricity, the rest power is
used to pump the CO2 to a high pres-sure. In peak ours, the stored high-
pressure CO2 is heated by solar energy and drives the turbine to generate
electricity. The system use two manmade reservoirs to storage liquid CO 2,
which avoids geographically restricted problem. At the same time, compared
with liquid air, CO2 with a low boiling point. LCES is technically easier to
implement, and has a simpler structure than LAES.
For the proposed LCES, the pressures of both high and low liquid CO 2
storage tanks keep constant during the working process. A recuperator is
introduced to recover the turbine waste heat and effectively improves the
system efficiency. A liquid air energy storage system is proposed for
comparison the performances. The shaft power production for both systems
are set as 11.5 MW. The mathematical models of both systems are developed
and imple-mented. Energy analysis is performed using the first law of ther-
modynamics to reveal the cycle efficiency, energy storage density, and net
work of the system. Exergy analysis is carried out based on the second law of
thermodynamics. The exergy reflects the maximum capacity of a physical to
do work with a reference environment and reveals the level of energy quality.
It is an important method to improve the thermodynamic performance by
identifying the exergy destruction of each component. The energy and exergy
analysis results are used to verify the feasibility of systems. The effects of
some key parameters on system
Fig. 1. The schematic of the LCES system.
performance are also analyzed, and then to reveal the direction of
improvement in system parameter settings.
The organization of this paper is summarized as follow: A brief
introduction is presented in section 1. The schematic description of systems is
presented in section 2. Thermodynamic models are established in section 3.
The simulation results are carried out in section 4. Performances of the LCES
under a typical meteorological condition is analyzed in section 5. The
conclusion is drawn in section 6.
2. System description
2.1. Scheme 1 (LCES)
The scheme of liquid carbon dioxide energy storage system (LCES) is
shown in Fig. 1. The liquid CO2 is stored in low pressure storage tank (LPS)
with 25 C and 6.5 MPa. During off-peak hours, the liquid CO 2 in LPS is
pumped to 25 MPa and then is condensed to 25 C again in condenser 1, and
then stored in high pressure storage tank (HPS). During peak hours, the liquid
CO2 of HPS flows into the recuperator and heater serially to absorb the heat
and is evaporated to gas. In order to increase the turbine output power, a
concen-trated solar thermal plant is introduced to heat the working fluid to
550 C (Turchi et al., 2013). The solar field consists of a heliostat field, a
receiver and a tower for fixing the receiver, and two thermal storage tanks
with molten salt. The heliostat system tracks the sun in real time and re flects
sunlight onto the receiver surface. The molten salt in the low temperature
molten salt storage tank is transported to the receiver located on the high
tower through the molten salt circulation pump, then exchange heat to raise its
temperature to 574 C and is pumped to the high-temperature molten salt
storage tank. The molten salt circulation pump has a small power and is
therefore ignored in the calculation. Next, the high-temperature molten salt is
sent to the power system heater and heats the CO 2 to 550 C. Then the high
temperature and high pressure CO2 enters the turbine and is expanded to 6.5
MPa. Since the temperature of CO 2 at the turbine outlet is about 400 C, a
recuperator can effectively recover the turbine waste heat to improve the
system efficiency. The CO2 after the recuperator is condensed to liquid again
and stored in the LPS.
4 M. Xu et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437

2.2. Scheme 2 (LAES) 3. Thermodynamic modeling

The scheme of the liquid air energy storage is shown in Fig. 2. The LAES 3.1. Assumptions
is divided into three processes: charging process, cold recycle and discharging
process. To simplify the systems, some assumptions are employed as follows:

2.2.1. Charging process

(1) The system operates under the steady state.
Air is compressed to high pressure (12 MPa) by the compression train,
(2) The pressure drops in pipes and heat exchangers are ignored.
which consists of a low pressure compressor (LPC), an in-termediate pressure
(3) The heat and friction losses in each component is neglected.
compressor (IPC) and a high pressure compressor (HPC) connected in series.
(4) The ambient temperature and pressure are set to be 15 C and 0.1 MPa.
The compressed high pres-sure air flows into the cold box then is cooled to a
very low tem-perature (below 180 C). Subsequently, the low temperature high
pressure air is expanded to 0.15 MPa and changes into a two-phase liquid-
vapor mixture through Joule Thomson valve. Then it is separated into liquid
and gas by a gas-liquid separator. The cold liquid air is stored in the liquid 3.2. Thermodynamic models
storage tank, but the gas flows out of the system.
In this part, the thermodynamic models are established based on the first
law of thermodynamics and the second law of thermodynamics.

The exergy flow of each component can be expressed as:

2.2.2. Cold recycle process
In the LAES, the cooling capacity produced during vaporization is stored
by two tanks (warm tank and cold tank), and is utilized for air liquefaction, E ¼ m,½h h0 T0,ðs s0Þ& (1)
which improves energy storage efficiency. In charging process, cold medium The energy generated per unit volume (EVR) of storage is given
flows from cold tank to cold box, where it obtains heat and ultimately is by:
stored in warm tank. On the contrary, in discharging process, the medium
flows from warm tank through a heat exchanger to the cold tank. This cold Wnet,tdischar
storage cycle is realized by two stages. Two liquids are used as the cold EVR ¼ V (2)
storage medium, the liquid propane (boiling point: 42.09 C, freezing point:
For the LCES, Wnet is defined as:
187.6 C) and the liquid methanol (boiling point: 64.7 C, freezing point: 97.8
C). In the first stage, liquid propane (R290) is selected as storage medium, in
which the temperatures of the medium in cold tank and warm tank are 185 C Wnet ¼ Wtur (3)
and 60 C, respectively. In the second stage, liquid methanol is used as cold For the LAES, Wnet is defined as:
storage medium, and the temperatures in cold tank and warm tank are 60 C
n
and 25 C, respectively.
¼
X

Wnet Wtur;n Wpump (4)

1

2.2.3. Discharging process The round trip efficiency (RTE) of the LCES can be defined as:
During the discharging, liquid air is pressured by a cryogenic liquid pump.
The high pressure liquid air is firstly heated to 65.6 C by propane and then to Wtur,tdischar
20 C by methanol. The heat supplied is from two stages cold storage cycles. RTE ¼
At the same time the temperatures of liquid propane and methanol decrease Wpump þ Qheater ,tchar (5)
from 60 C to 185 C and 25 C to 60 C, respectively. The high pressure and The RTE of the LAES can be defined as:
warm air should be further heated by external heat source. Finally, the heated ,t
air drives the turbine to produce electricity. RTE ¼ Wtur1 þ Wtur2 Wpump dischar (6)
ð þ þ Þ
com1 com2 char
The exergy efficiency of both systems can be described as:
P E
hex ¼ 1 in (7)
EDcomponents

where the EDcomponents denotes the component exergy destruction, and the
Ein is the total exergy input to the system.

3.3. Compressor

The isentropic efficiency of compressor is defined as:

h hs;out hin (8)

com ¼
hout hin

Fig. 2. The schematic diagram of the LAES system. where hs,out is the specific enthalpy at the outlet of compressor under the
condition of isentropic compression, and hin, hout represent the inlet and
outlet specific enthalpies of compressor, respectively.
The power consumption of compressor can be expressed as:
 M. Xu et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437

temperature difference, respectively.

Wcom ¼ mchar,ðhout hinÞ
(9)
The exergy destruction in compressor is given as: ðDTG DTLÞ
DT (18)
EDcom ¼ Wcom þ Ecom;in Ecom;out lmtd ¼
lnðDTG=DTLÞ
(10)
where DTG and DTL represent the large temperature difference and the small
temperature difference.
3.3.1. Pump U can be calculated by:
The water head of pump can be defined as: dp
1 1 1
p p
H¼ out in

Dg h h
U ¼ cold þ hot þ lp þ Rw (19
(11) where hcold, hhot, dp, lp and Rw represent cold side convective heat
transfer coefficient, hot side convective heat transfer coefficient, material wall
thickness, material thermal conductivity, and fouling thermal resistance,
respectively.
The convective heat transfer coefficient can be obtained by:

DgqvH lf ,Nu
h D
Wpump ¼ sh (12) h¼ h (20)
where qv represents the volume flow of liquid output from the pump. hsh where lf , Dh represent heat transfer rate of heat exchanger and hydraulic
refers to the pump efficiency, which is defined as the ratio of the effective diameter, respectively.
power of the pump to the shaft power. The hydraulic diameter of a semi-circular channel structure can be gained
The exergy destruction of pump can be denoted as: by:

EDpump ¼ Ein þ Wpump Eout (13) 4Afp

Dh ¼
Cfp (21)
3.3.2. Heat exchanger where Afp and Cfp represent the runner area and runner circum-ference,
respectively.
The heat balance equation of heat exchanger can be described
For the calculation of the fluid Nu number in PCHE, the Gnie-linski
as:
relation is used (Serrano et al., 2014). For different Re number ranges, the Nu
number can be calculated as follows:

Q ¼m h h ¼ m h h (14) 8 Nu ¼ 4:089ðRe < 2300Þ

hx hot hot;in hot;out cool cool;out cool;in
Nu5000 4:089
where Qhx represents the heat exchange capacity, m hot, hhot,in and hhot,out >
represent mass flow rate, inlet specific enthalpy and outlet specific enthalpy of
>

the hot stream, respectively. Correspondingly, mcool, hcool,out and hcool,in

represent mass flow rate, inlet specific enthalpy and outlet specific enthalpy of > Nu ¼ 4 :089 þ 5000 23 00 ð2300 Re < 5000Þ

cool stream, respectively. >

The heat exchange effectiveness can be defined as:

hhx ¼ Qmax ¼ Qmax (15) > (22)
h
m h
cool cool;out cool;in m
hot
h
hot;in
h
hot;out > f =8 Re 1000 Pr
>
¼ 1 12:7ÞðP r 2=3 1 f d=8
ð Þ

>

ð
where hhot,in, hhot,out, hcool,in and hcool,out represent the specific enthalpy of < Nu d Þ Re 5000
hot stream inlet, hot stream outlet, cool stream inlet, cool stream outlet, > þ

respectively. >

The exergy destruction can be written as: > qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi

>

3.4. Turbine

The isentropic efficiency of the turbine is given as:

h hout hin (23)

 tur ¼
hs;out hin
where hout is the outlet specific enthalpy of turbine, and hin is the
ED ¼ E þE E E
hx hot;in cool;in hot;out cool;out (16) inlet specific enthalpy of turbine.
The expansion work of turbine can be expressed as:
where Ehot,in, Ehot,out, Ecool,in, and Ecool;outrepresent the exergy flow
of hot stream inlet, hot stream outlet, cool stream inlet, cool stream ¼ ð Þ
outlet, respectively. Wtur m, hin hout (24)
Enhanced logarithmic mean temperature difference method is The exergy destruction of expansion process is given as:
used in the design process of heat exchangers (Li et al., 2018). The ¼
heat transfer capacity and the global heat transfer coefficient can be EDtur Ein Eout Wtur (25)
calculated by:
where Ein and Eout are the inlet exergy flow and outlet exergy flow,
respectively.
Q ¼ U,A,DTlmtd (17)
In order to study the impact of solar energy fluctuations on
where Q , U, A, DTlmtd represent heat exchange capacity, global heat system performance,a multi-stage axial flow turbine model is
transfer coefficient, heat exchange area, and logarithmic mean adopted. The Stodola ellipse method is used to establish the
6 M. Xu et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437

turbine's off-design condition model (Gabbrielli, 2012). Table 1

Parameters setting in simulation of LCES.
T
in off Items Values

f m
off in off qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi (26) The ambient temperature( C) 15
P
¼ in off The ambient pressure(kPa) 101.3
The isentropic efficiency of pump 0.85
where foff is the mass flow coefficient of turbine under off-design he isentropic efficiency of turbine 0.9
condition. The min-off, Tin-off, Pin-off are turbine inlet mass flow, The heat exchange effectiveness 0.75
temperature and pressure under off-design condition, respectively. Pump inlet pressure (MPa) 6.5
Pump outlet pressure (MPa) 25
Liquid storage temperature( C) 25
2 Mass fl ow rate(kg/s) 67.5 38

1P P
f
off
out off in off

rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi Charge time(h) 4

. (27)
f
design
¼ out design
1P design 2 Discharge time(h) 4

rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi

where fdesign is the mass flow coefficient of turbine under design Table 2
condition. The Pout-off, Pin-design, Pout-design are turbine outlet pres- Parameters setting in simulation of LAES.
sure in off-design condition, turbine inlet pressure in design con-
Items Values

dition and turbine outlet pressure under design condition,

The ambient temperature ( C) 15
respectively.
The ambient pressure (kPa) 100
The isentropic efficiency of compressor 0.85
2 2 The isentropic efficiency of pump 0.85
P ,T ,Y
in off ¼ min off in off d þP
out off (28) The isentropic efficiency of turbine 0.90
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi Compressor inlet pressure (MPa) 0.1
where Yd is Stodola constant, which can be calculated according to Compressor outlet pressure (MPa) 12
the parameters of turbine under design condition. Tank pressure (MPa) 0.15
Throttle valve outlet pressure (MPa) 0.15
2 2 Pump outlet pressure (MPa) 2.2
P P
in design out design Turbine outlet pressure (MPa) 0.1
Yd ¼ P
2
:f
2
(29) Mass flow rate (kg/s) 26.96
in design design Charge time (h) 4
The isentropic efficiency of the turbine in off-design condition is Discharge time(h) 4

calculated by:
cp ¼ 1443 þ 0:172,t (31)
where cp and t are molten salt specific heat at constant pressure and molten
2 m 3 salt temperature.
hoff ¼ hdesign:sin 0:5p m in off 0:1 (30)
4 5

4. Results and discussion

in design !
The thermodynamic properties of working fluids are calculated by the
where hoff and hdesign are turbine isentropic efficiency under off-design REFPROP 9.1 developed by the National Institute of Stan-dards and
condition and design condition, respectively. Technology of the United States(Lemmon et al. (2010)).
The ambient temperature and pressure of both systems are set as 15 C and
3.4.1. Molten salt 101.3 kPa. The mass flow rates of the LCES and LAES are 67.538 kg/s and
The molten salt consists of 60% of NaNO 3 and 40% of KNO3 by mass 26.96 kg/s. For more information, main parameters under the design
percent. The specific heat at constant pressure of the molten salt is: conditions of LCES and LAES are listed in Table 1 and Table 2. Based on
these settings, thermodynamic calculations are conducted for every state
point.
 The effects of some key parameters on the system performance, including
pump/compressor isentropic efficiency, turbine isen-tropic efficiency, pump
outlet pressure, turbine inlet temperature and storage tank pressure, are shown in Tables 1 and 2.
investigated. One parameter is investigated every time, and the other
parameters keep constant as 4.1. The comparison between two systems

The detailed thermodynamic results of the LCES and the LAES are shown
in Table 3 and Table 4. For the LCES, the total exergy destruction is 5.61
MW. It is easy to find that the recuperator (42.58%), heater (32.44%), and the
turbine (9.98%) have larger exergy destruction than other components.

Table 4 shows the physical parameters of every state point and the
corresponding components exergy destruction of the LAES. The total exergy
destruction of the LAES is 12.97 MW, which is much larger than the exergy
destruction of LCES because it has more components. Moreover, the pressure
ratio of the compressor is higher than the pressure ratio of the pump in the
LCES, thus the exergy loss in coolers of the LAES is much higher than the
condenser in LCES. The exergy destruction in coolers and heater is the most
important part, which are 4.21 MW (32.46%) and 2.88 MW (22.2%),
respectively. The exergy destruction in throttle valve and

Table 3
Thermodynamic parameters of the LCES.

State(i) T ( C) P(MPa) Mass flow rate (kg/s) Exergy destruction (MW)

1 25 6.5 67.538 EDpump ¼ 0.175(3.12%)

2 53.26 25 67.538 EDcondensor1 ¼ 0.30(5.34%)
3 25 25 67.538
4 25 25 67.538
5 272.75 25 67.538 EDrec ¼ 2.39(42.58%)
6 550 25 67.538 EDheat ¼ 1.822(32.44%)
7 392.91 6.5 67.538 EDTur ¼ 0.59 (9.98%)
8 31.38 6.5 67.538
9 25 6.5 67.538 EDcondeser2 ¼ 0.362(6.45%)
Wpump ¼ 1.8 MW Wtur ¼ 11.5 MW Wnet ¼ 11.5 WM
 M. Xu et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437 7

Table 4
Thermodynamic parameters of the LAES.

State(i) T( C) P(MPa) Mass flow rate (kg/s) Working fluid Exergy destruction (MW)

1 15 0.1 26.96 CO2

2 194.15 0.493 26.96 CO2
3 20 0.493 26.96 CO2
4 218.03 2.433 26.96 CO2
5 25 2.433 26.96 CO2 EDcom ¼ 1.478(11.39%)
6 228.25 12 26.96 CO2 EDcooler ¼ 4.21(32.46%)
7 25 12 26.96 CO2 EDcoldbox ¼ 0.167(1.29%)
8 188.65 12 26.96 CO2 EDvalve ¼ 1.3(10.02%)
9 190.49 0.15 26.96 CO2
10 190.49 0.15 1.556 CO2
11 190.49 0.15 25.4 CO2
12 60 0.15 1.556 CO2
13 185 0.15 30.337 propane
14 60 0.15 30.337 propane
15 60 0.15 12.254 methanol
16 25 0.15 12.254 methanol
17 190.49 0.15 25.4 CO2 EDpump ¼ 0.045(0.35%)
18 183.41 2.2 25.4 CO2 EDhx1 ¼ 1.84(14.19%)
19 65.6 2.2 25.4 CO2 EDhx2 ¼ 0.049(0.38%)
20 25 2.2 25.4 CO2 EDheater ¼ 2.88(22.2%)
21 550 2.2 25.4 CO2
22 298.9 0.469 25.4 CO2
23 118.05 0.1 25.4 CO2 EDtur ¼ 0.792(6.1%)
24 25 0.15 12.254 methanol
25 60 0.15 12.254 methanol
26 60 0.15 30.336 propane
27 185 0.15 30.336 propane
Wcom ¼ 15.82 MW Wnet ¼ 11.5 MW.

compressor are 1.3 MW and 1.478 MW, respectively. The exergy destruction
in turbine accounts for 6.1%.
Table 5 shows the comparison results of system performance. It can be
noted that the LCES has a higher round trip efficiency (RTE) of 45.35%,
which is 7.52% larger than the LAES under design con-ditions. The exergy
efficiency of the LCES is 67.2%, which is much higher than the 45.48% of the
LAES. For the EVR, the LAES exhibits a better performance. This is because
only liquid air storage tank volume is considered, and more detailed results
are shown in Table 6.
Table 6 displays the major volumes requirement for two energy storage
systems. Under the premise of the same power output, the LCES needs two
liquid storage tanks because it is a closed cycle. While in the LAES,
additional four tanks are needed for cold storage, so the total volume of the
storage tank is approximately equal to the total volume of the LCES.
10.73%, respectively. The systems output power and fluid storage density are
not affected by the compressor isentropic efficiency.
The influence of turbine isentropic efficiency on systems per-formance are
plotted in Fig. 4. In the case that the turbine inlet conditions and expansion
ratio are the same, the rising turbine isentropic efficiency brings about an
increase in turbine output and a reduction in turbine exergy destruction.
Consequently, the system net output power of the LCES increases from 8.3
MW to 12.14 MW (growth rate is 46.15%), resulting a same growth rate of
the EVR. The RTE and exergy efficiency increase 29.89% and 30.48%,
respectively. For the LAES, the system net output power increases from 8.72
MW to 12.02 MW (growth rate is 37.89%). Be different with the LCES, the
compressor energy consumption, fluid storage density, the pump energy
consumption of the LAES are not affected by the turbine isentropic efficiency.
Thus, the variation of the RTE, EVR, exergy efficiency are determined by the
turbine output power, resulting in the same growth rate with the system net
output power.

4.2. Parameters analysis

Fig. 3 shows the impact of pump/compressor isentropic effi-ciency on
systems performance. For the LCES, the round trip effi-ciency (RTE) and
exergy efficiency rise by 3.08% and 4.58%, respectively, while the pump
isentropic efficiency increases from 0.65 to 0.95. That is because the increase
in the isentropic efficiency of the pump reduces the power consumption and
exergy destruc-tion of the pump when the pressure ratio is constant. For the
same reason, the RTE and exergy efficiency of the LAES grow 7.62% and
Fig. 5 shows the system performance parameters changing rule with the
increase of pump outlet pressure. For the LCES, with the increase of pump
outlet pressure from 18 MPa to 28 MPa, the tur-bine pressure ratio increases
from 2.77 to 4.31, resulting in a growth rate of 44.04% of turbine output
power. Besides, the fluid density increases with the increase of the pressure.
Thus, the EVR grows faster than the system net output power, which grows
3 3
from 13.81 kWh/m to 20.38 kWh/m , and the growth rate is as high as
47.6%. The RTE and exergy efficiency growth rate are 21.33% and
Table 5
The comparison of the main performance parameters under design condition.

Items LCES LAES

Net power generated during discharging 11.5 MW 11.5 MW
Round trip efficiency of the cycle 45.35% 37.83%
Exergy efficiency 67.2% 45.48%
3 3
Energy generated per unit volume of liquid storage 18.06 kWh/m 101.6 kWh/m
8 M. Xu et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437

Table 6
The comparison of the major volumes for the proposed systems.

Items LCES LAES

3 3
Volume of the liquid reservoir 2548 m 453m
3
Low temperature cold storage tanks (warm and cold tanks) / 2*727 m
3
High temperature cold storage tanks (warm and cold tanks) / 2*294m
3 3
Total volume 2548 m 2493m

(a) LCES

(b) LAES
Fig. 3. The effects of compressor/pump isentropic efficiency on system performance (a) LCES (b) LAES.

19.25% respectively. Be different with the LCES, the fluid storage pressure in 1.5 MPa to 2.5 MPa. Simultaneously, the risen pump outlet pressure increases
LAES is independent with the pump outlet pressure, thus, the system net the pump power consumption, resulting in a slight decrease in the growth
output power and EVR have the same growth rate of 12.01% with the rates of RTE (growth rate is 11.77%) and exergy efficiency (growth rate is
increase of pump outlet pressure from 11.82%).
 M. Xu et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437

(a) LCES

(b) LAES
Fig. 4. The effects of turbine isentropic efficiency on system performance (a) LCES (b) LAES.

The influence of turbine inlet temperature increasing from 350 C to 650 C
on the two systems performance are exhibited in Fig. 6. For the LCES,
turbine inlet temperature has a significant impact on system net output power.
The system net output power grows by 61.08% with the increase of turbine
inlet temperature. The EVR has the same growth rate with system output
power for the storage volume of CO2 being stored remaining unchanged with
the rising of turbine inlet temperature. Since the growing turbine inlet
temperature leads to a growth of utilization of external heat, the RTE has a
relatively lower growth, and the growth rate is only 4.52%. However, the
exergy efficiency declines with the increase of
turbine inlet temperature. Although the increase in turbine inlet temperature
leads to an increase in total system input exergy, the exergy destruction of
turbine and heater have increased accord-ingly. More importantly, the
temperature at the turbine outlet also rises as the turbine inlet temperature,
resulting in a significantly growth of exergy destruction in recuperator and
condenser 2. This results in a faster increase in the total exergy destruction of
the components, which increases faster than the exergy input. For the same
reason, for the LAES, EVR and system net output power are increase by
51.41%, while the RTE increase from 34.46% to 39.06%. But unlike the
LCES, the LAES is an open loop where the exhaust
10 M. Xu et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437

(a) LCES

b LAES
Fig. 5. The effects of pump outlet pressure on system performance (a) LCES (b) LAES.

from the turbine outlet is sent directly to the atmosphere. The in-crease in
turbine outlet temperature does not affect the exergy destruction of other
components, thus the exergy efficiency have a slight increase.
Fig. 7 exhibits the influence of fluid storage pressure on system
performance. Because LCES is a closed loop system, it consists of two liquid
CO2 storage tank, HPS and LPS. The pressure of the two reservoirs on the
system performance are shown in Fig. 7 (a1) and (a2). The pressure of HPS is
equal to the pump outlet pressure, then the result is not analyzed again. The
minimum pressure of LPS should be above 6.4 MPa to ensure the carbon
dioxide in liquid
phase. Thus, the variation range between 6.5 MPa and 10 MPa is selected.
The system net output power has a higher reduction rate of 28.97%. However,
the heat recovery from recuperator grows with the rising pressure of CO 2 in
LPS, easing the decrease of RTE. The RTE and exergy efficiency reduce by
16.27% and 15.89%, respec-tively. The CO 2 storage density has an increase
with the rising of fluid storage pressure, then the EVR decreases by 23.07%,
which is smaller than that of system net output power. For the LAES, the air
storage pressure should be under 0.21 MPa to ensure it can be liquefied, thus,
the variation range is set as 0.12 MPae0.2 MPa. Unlike the LCES, the system
output power increase with the growth
 M. Xu et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437

(a) LCES

(b) LAES
Fig. 6. The effects of turbine inlet temperature on system performance (a) LCES (b) LAES.

of the air storage pressure, it is because the pump consumption decreases with
the increase of the air storage pressure. Meanwhile, the RTE, exergy
efficiency and EVR increase by 2.55%, 3.46% and 2.94%, respectively.
5. Performance study of the LCES under a typical meteorological
condition
A concentrating solar power tower system is used as heat source for the
LCES. While solar energy is unstable, the impact of solar fluctuations on
LCES performance will be analyzed in this section.
As shown in Fig. 1, the solar field is coupled with a thermal storage
system. The thermal storage system can effectively sup-press the fluctuation
of solar energy and play a vital role in achieving stable operation of the power
system. The thermal stor-age system can be implemented in different
operation modes depending on the intensity of the solar radiation and the load
on the grid. The temperature of the thermal storage system fluctuates within a
small range.
In this paper, System Advisor Model (SAM) 8.11 developed by the
National New energy Lab is adopted to model the solar tower field, and
calculate the thermal energy input to the energy storage
 (a1) LCES

(a2) LCES

(b) LAES
Fig. 7. The effects of storage tank pressure on system performance (a1) LCES (a2) LCES (b) LAES.
 M. Xu et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437

Table 7 typical meteorological condition of the chosen day.

Solar field tower parameter design values.
According to the weather of the day, the solar field can supply the energy
Items Values storage system with the heat needed to discharge from 7:00 a.m. Before the
DNI(W/m )
2
950 sun went down, the solar field can provide enough heat.
HTF hot temperature ( C) 574
HTF cold temperature ( C) 290 The temperature change of the high temperature molten is shown in Fig.
Full load hours of storage (hours) 4 9. When there is sunshine, the receiver can absorb heat, and the temperature
of the high temperature molten salt is almost unchanged. After the sun went
down from 18 o'clock, the molten salt has a small temperature drop due to the
system and the temperature of the molten salt in the high tem-perature molten heat dissipa-tion to the environment. In this paper, after 18 o'clock, when the
salt tank. Based on this, the impacts of solar energy on the LCES system are temperature change of molten salt is relatively large, the LCES be-gins to
analyzed. release energy, and the discharge time is 4 h. The heat stored in the high-
Table 7 shows the design parameters of the solar tower field. The temperature molten salt storage tank can meet the full-load heat of 4 h. When
meteorological data comes from Daggett, located at latitude: 34.87, longitude: the temperature of the molten salt drops, the mass flow rate of the molten salt
116.78. March 21, 2012 is selected as a typical day to study the impact of and the mass flow rate of the CO2 keep unchanged.
solar variation on the system performance. Fig. 8 shows the DIN values and
the dry bulb temperature under the
The influence of the change of the heat source on the system performance
is calculated by the off-design condition model in discharging process. The
turbine inlet temperature changes as shown in Fig. 9. From 18 o'clock to 22
o'clock, the temperature of the high temperature molten salt dropped from
570.23 C to 566.9 C. The turbine inlet temperature drops from 530.94 C to
514.32 C accordingly. Since the specific heat capacity of the molten salt is
larger, and the heat at the turbine inlet is also positively fed back to the
regenerator for heat exchange. Thus, the temperature variation at the turbine
inlet is greater than the change of the molten salt temperature.

The energy and exergy performances are shown in Fig. 10. As the inlet
temperature of the turbine drops by 16.61 C, the efficiency of the turbine has
changed within this range of variation, thus the turbine output power is
reduced by 0.13 MW, from 11.19 MW to 10.92 MW. Corresponding, the
3
EVR is reduced by about 0.42 kWh/ m , the RTE is reduced from 44.47% to
43.88%, and the exergy ef-ficiency is reduced from 66.64% to 66.43%. The
effects of turbine inlet temperature on exergy destruction of components are
shown in Fig. 11. The exergy destruction of the heater has increased by 1.9%,
Fig. 8. DNI values and dry bulb temperature of the typical meteorological condition.

Fig. 9. Hot salt temperature and turbine inlet temperature in typical meteorological condition.
14 M. Xu et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437
Fig. 10. The impacts of molten salt temperature on the performance of the LCES.
Fig. 11. The impacts of molten salt temperature on the exergy destruction of compo-nents in
the LCES.
while the exergy destruction of the recuperator and the turbine has a slight
decreased with the decrease in turbine inlet temperature.
6. Conclusions
In this paper, a novel liquid carbon dioxide energy storage sys-tem is
proposed. The energy and exergy performance are analyzed. The LAES
system is analyzed to compare with the LCES to quanti-tatively evaluate the
performance of the LCES. Besides, the system off-design performance during
discharging is carried out under the condition of solar energy fluctuations. The
main conclusions can be drawn as follows:
(1) Under the design condition, the RTE and exergy efficiency of the
LCES are 45.35% and 67.2%, which are higher than 37.83%
% and 45.48% of the LAES system. The EVR of the LCES is 18.06
3 3
kWh/m , which is lower than 101.6 kWh/m of the
3
LAES. However, the total liquid reservoir of the LCES is 2548 m ,
3
which is close to the total volume (2493 m ) of LAES.
(2) The turbine isentropic efficiency has a greater impact on the system
net output power and EVR of the LCES than those of the LAES, while the
effects on RTE and the exergy efficiency of the LCES are less than the LAES.
For the LAES, with the increase of turbine isentropic efficiency from 65% to
95%, the system net output power, EVR and the exergy efficiency have the
same growth rate of 46.16%.
(3) The turbine inlet temperature has a significant impact on system net
output power and EVR for both systems. For the LCES, the system net output
power and EVR have the same growth rate of 61.08% with the increase in
turbine inlet temperature. For the LAES, the EVR and system net output
power are increase by 51.41%.
(4) The exergy destruction in LAES is much higher than the LCES. For
LAES, coolers, heater, throttle valve are the main con-tributors to system
exergy destruction. For LCES, the exergy destruction in recuperatora and
heater is greater.
(5) The unstable characteristics of solar energy affects the total amount of
heat supply. However, due to the thermal storage system, it has little effect on
the temperature of the heat source, and thus has little effect on the inlet
temperature of the turbine.
For the LCES, there are still some limitations. The high system operating
pressure is a challenge for materials. The excessive pipe pressure drop loss
will increase with pressure, and the single liquid storage tank should not be
too large, therefore it is more suitable for distributed energy. At the same
time, the implementation of the system relies on the design and development
of efficient super-critical carbon dioxide turbines and printed circuit heat
exchangers.
In the future work, there are several issues to be considered. The
efficiency of the recuperator has a great influence on the RTE of the system.
Thus, it is important to design a more efficient recuperator. The overall
operational characteristics of the system need to be studied. Dynamic model
of the system and operation strategy of the
 M. Xu et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 242 (2020) 118437
system should be established. Further experimental studies are needed to
validate the simulation and explore the actual opera-tional characteristics of
the system.
Acknowledgment
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the National
Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51876152). Thanks are also
given to editor and reviewers for their contribu-tions on this manuscript.
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