Conference Year
2016
Keywords
Chemical Heat Pump, Electrochemical Cells
Abstract
Electrochemical cells have been widely explored for their use in high efficiency energy systems. In this paper a novel heat pump cycle is proposed which utilizes chemical looping driven by electrochemical cells. Chemical looping is a method that has been applied to various applications such as combustion and air separation. It consists of the cycling of a substance between different chemical compositions in order to produce a desired effect. When the chemical composition of a fluid changes, various properties such as its saturation pressure will also change. In the proposed concept, the chemical looping of electrochemically active fluids was leveraged in order to generate a heat pumping effect. A number of electrochemically active liquid organic hydrogen carriers including alcohols such as cyclohexanol and isopropanol have been investigated for use in conjunction with electrochemical cells. These organic fluids were integrated into a thermodynamic model of the proposed cycle. When operating as an air conditioner the model indicated that an increase in cooling COP of over 20% could be achieved in comparison to a conventional vapor compression system using R410A.