Parametric Optimisation of a Trigenerative Small Scale Compressed Air Energy Storage System

Recently, major improvement on compressed air energy storage technology has been made by using the heat of compression for heating energy or using it to preheat the compressed air in the expansion phase and by demonstrating its ability to produce cooling energy. Thus, the trigenerative compressed air energy storage has been introduced. In this paper, we introduce a configuration of trigenerative compressed air energy storage system giving the preference to the electric energy production. The study then focuses on undertaking an optimization study via a parametric analysis considering the mutual effects of parameters. This analysis is applied to a micro-scale application including the existing technological aspects. The parametric study results applied on the hot temperature of the thermal energy storage indicate the possibility to find an optimal solution as a trade-off between system performances and other parameters reflecting its cost. On the contrary, the selection of the maximal storage pressure cannot be achieved by finding a compromise between energy density and system efficiency. A complete study of other design parameters will be addressed in a future publication.