简介：Climate Change is getting serious and becoming a real threat to the planet. With the agreement of Paris Pact, the urgency to deal with greenhouse gas emission has been put on agenda for many countries. Energy efficiency and renewable energy are critical to the carbon reduction and low-carbon economy. As one of the renewable-energy technologies, concentrating solar power (CSP) with thermal energy storage (TES) provides utility-scale, dispatchable electricity to the power grid. To be competitive in solar generation cost while providing baseload power generation, CSP technology needs to increase solar-to-electric efficiency, significantly reduce energy-conversion system cost. The increase in energy-conversion efficiency favors high operating temperature and needs low-cost materials. Current heat transfer fluids (HTF) of oil and nitrate salt have limitation on high temperature stability. The nitrate-salt HTF incurs high cost of storage media and TES container with limited high-temperature ability. This presentation will explore the approach and technology opportunity for CSP to achieve lower cost and higher performance in grid-scale integration. 

报告人简介:

Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2000

M.S. Mechanical Engineering, The University of Akron, 1996

M.S. Thermal Engineering, Tsinghua University, 1992

B.S. Thermal Engineering, Tsinghua University, 1989

Zhiwen joined NREL in 2009 and work in the Thermal System Group. He has working experience on multiple fields including combustion, fluidization, hydrogen and fuel cells, optoelectronic and electric packaging, gas turbines, and solar power generation. He taught in the Department of Engineering Mechanics at Tsinghua University, conducted research in multiphase flow and developed pyrometer. Since 2001, He was working on fuel cell performance testing and modeling at FuelCell Energy.  Before joining NREL, Zhiwen worked for GE Aviation on jet engine design and thermal/fluid modeling. Currently he works in the CSP team and focuses on system analysis, heat-transfer fluids property measurement, and thermal-storage concepts for concentrating solar power technology development.