Thermal effects in liquid metal batteries
During charge and discharge of a liquid metal battery, heat will be release by Ohmic heating. The heat will be transfered by convection, conduction and radiation. A thermal management ensures that the global cell temperature stays in the desired range (fig. 1).
The electrolyte layer (consisting of a molten salt) has the highest resistance of the three phases; fig. 2 shows a typical temperature profile. The bottom metal will be heated from above - it will be stably stratified. The upper metall will be heated from below - convection will set in.
Typically, thermal convection cells will appear in the upper metal layer and the electrolyte. At HZDR we study Rayleigh-Bénard convection with the objective of enhancing mass transfer and increasing the efficiency of liquid metal batteries. For that purpose we developed recently a multiphase solver for OpenFOAM(1) using the Oberbeck-Boussinesq approximation for describing thermal convection in all three liquid layers.
Publications
- Personnettaz, P.; Klopper, T. S.; Weber, N.; Weier, T.
Layer coupling between solutal and thermal convection in liquid metal batteries
International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 188(2022) 122555(2) - Liu, K.; Stefani, F.; Weber, N.; Weier, T.; Li, B.W.
Numerical and experimental investigation of electro-vortex flow in a cyclindrical container
Magnetohydrodynamics 56(2020) 27-41(3) - Personnettaz, P.; Beckstein, P.; Landgraf, S.; Köllner, T.; Nimtz, M.; Weber, N.; Weier, T.
Thermally driven convection in Li||Bi liquid metal batteries
Journal of Power Sources 401(2018) 362-374(4) - Weber, N.; Nimtz, M.; Personnettaz, P.; Salas, A.; Weier, T.
Electromagnetically driven convection suitable for mass transfer enhancement in liquid metal batteries
Applied Thermal Engineering 143(2018) 293-301(5) - Ashour, R.; Kelley, D.; Salas, A.; Starace, M.; Weber, N.; Weier, T.
Competing forces in liquid metal electrodes and batteries
Journal of Power Sources 378(2018) 301-310(6) - Kelley, D.; Weier, T.
Fluid mechanics of liquid metal batteries
Applied Mechanics Reviews 70(2018) 020801(7) - Personnettaz, P.
Assessment of thermal phenomena in Li||Bi liquid metal batteries through analytical and numerical models
Master thesis, Politecnico di Torino (2017)
URL of this article
https://www.hzdr.de/db/Cms?pOid=55220