Induction heating of firebricks for the large-scale storage of nuclear and renewable energy

The lack of low-cost, large-scale energy storage is one of the biggest obstacles to the ongoing transition from an energy market dominated by fossil fuels to one dominated by nuclear and renewable energy. Storing energy as heat in firebricks has a number of potential advantages over existing energy storage methods such as batteries and pumped-storage. This work investigated the application of induction heating to firebrick energy storage. The distributions of magnetic field and temperature in firebricks under induction heating were simulated and compared with experiments. It was found that firebricks can be induction heated to high temperatures (>700°C); different material compositions give different temperature responses; and rate of temperature increase is positively correlated with electrical conductivity. It was also shown that, in addition to use in large-scale energy storage, induction heating can be used to measure electrical conductivity and for firebrick quality assurance.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Ibekwe, Richard Tochi

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Charles Forsberg and Ahmed Ghoniem.

• Nuclear Science and Engineering.
• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119904

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/119904