Development and testing of a 200 kW tube bundle moving packed bed electrical heating device and test facility

The solid particle is a promising heat storage media with an allowable temperature usually higher than 800 degrees C. The surplus electricity from renewable energy power generation can be stored in solid particles as the form of thermal energy. However, heating treatment of solid particles remains a difficulty in industry, especially at the level of 800 degrees C. In the current work, a design method for the industrial device of heating moving packed beds is proposed. The flow structure is firstly designed as a bundle of tubes with a parallel connection based on the hydrodynamic behaviors of the moving packed bed. The dimensions of the structure are determined according to the thermodynamic behaviors of the moving packed bed. A test facility with a rated power of 200 kW was manufactured and tested for the validation of the proposed design method. The moving packed bed is heated from 294 degrees C to 780 degrees C after circulated for four times in the heating device. The errors between the test results and the design points are <10%. The proposed design method can be further applied to the design of multi-megawatt moving packed bed heating devices.