Zeolite thermal storage retains heat

indefinitely, absorbs four times more heat than

water

By Sebastian Anthony on June 6, 2012 at 1:06 pm

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Hold onto your hat/life partner/gonads: Scientists in Germany have created small, zeolite pellets
that can store up to four times more heat than water, loss-free for lengthy periods of time. In
theory, you can store heat in these pellets, and then extract exactly the same amount of heat after an
indeterminate amount of time.
Zeolites (literally boil stones) arent exactly new: The term was coined in 1756 by Axel
Cronstedt, a Swedish mineralogist who noted that some minerals, upon being heated, release large
amounts of steam from water that had been previously adsorbed. For the last 250 years, scientists
have tried to shoehorn this process in a heat storage system and now, the Fraunhofer Institute,
working with industrial partners, has worked out how to do it.
I will try to explain how this works, but the science is fairly complicated: When Fraunhofers
zeolite comes into contact with water, a chemical reaction adsorbs the water and emits heat. When
heat is applied to the zeolite, the process is reversed and the water is released. Because the heat is
locked up in the chemical structure of the zeolite, the material never actually feels warm which is
why this is a loss-free storage method.
These two processes can be kept separate so first you charge the balls up with heat, and then
later you can just add water (!) to release the heat. This reaction occurs all along the surface of the
zeolite and because zeolites are porous, a single gram of the material has a surface area of 1000
square meters (10,700sqft). It is for this reason that Fraunhofers zeolite can store up to four times
more heat than water.

While the hydration/dehydration process is well

understood, the main technical challenge was building an actual heat storage system. First we
developed the process engineering, then we looked around to see how we could physically
implement the thermal storage principle i.e. how a storage device has to be constructed, and at
which locations heat exchangers, pumps and valves are needed, says Mike Blicker, the group
manager. As you can see in the picture on the right, the setup is fairly complicated. The team has
now successfully built a transportable 750-liter storage tank, which is currently being wheeled
around Germany to test the storage system in real-world situations.
Moving forward, this could be huge news for almost every technological and industrial sphere.
Currently, there are very few options for storing heat other than water, which cant store much heat
for a given volume, and it loses heat relatively rapidly. Power plants, biogas plants, steel mills,
factories these all produce vast amounts of heat that could (and should) be reused. They wouldnt
even have to be used on-site, either: charged-up zeolite balls could be distributed to nearby homes
and offices. In the future, Blicker suggests that we could eventually replace house water tanks with
zeolite systems, too. It would be ideal if we were able to devise a modular system that would allow
us to construct each storage device to suit the individual requirement, says Blicker.
Personally, Im hoping for a module small enough to put inside each of my seven computers. I
wonder if thatll be enough to heat my shower in the morning
Read more at Fraunhofer, or check out Microsofts solution to waste heat: Data furnaces