CNR-Royal Society (RS) Bilateral Project
Title: Accelerating the development of ammonia-salt systems for sorption heat pumps.
ICCOM Principal Investigator: Angelo Freni.
Project Type: International.
Duration: 12/2019-12/2021.
Website: https://royalsociety.org/grants-schemes-awards/grants/
Abstract: The aim of the project is to prove the feasibility of a new generation of ammonia-salt sorption heat-driven heat pumps with significant efficiency improvement and cost reduction compared with existing ammonia-water or ammonia-carbon sorption systems. Quantitatively we want to establish the feasibility of: 1) a 2-salt resorption cycle that will deliver a heat pump COP of >1.6 with heat output of >500 W / litre of reactor volume, 2) a 3-salt resorption cycle with COP of >2.0 with heat output of >300 W / litre of reactor volume. To achieve these aims we need to be able to understand and predict reaction rates and heat and mass transfer in a range of metal salt and salt mixture ammoniation reactions where the salt is contained within a porous Expanded Natural Graphite (ENG) matrix. Pure salt (e.g. CaCl2, BaCl2, MnCl2) reactions have been studied in the literature but there is little work on them when contained in a conductive ENG matrix and very little on the behavior of intimate mixtures, but both offer significant advantages. Use of facilities at Warwick (Large Temperature Jump, Simultaneous Thermal Analysis, Magnetic Suspension Balance, DSC etc) and Pisa (NMR, FT-IR, XRD, SEM, Potentiodynamic Polarisation corrosion testing and Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy) will reveal the fundamental thermodynamic and chemical mechanisms at work and enable the design of proof of concept experiments.
Partnership: Warwick University, United Kingdom; ICCOM CNR.
ICCOM Participants: Angelo Freni, Claudia Forte, Silvia Pizzanelli, Emilia Bramanti.
Sponsored by: Royal Society of London and CNR.
Financial Contribution (overall): 23.500 €.
Financial Contribution (ICCOM): 12.000 €.