Design and evaluation of an advanced adiabatic compressed air energy storage system at the Michigan-Utah mine

Compressed air energy storage (CAES) is considered a viable option for matching intermittent sustainable energy and the production of peak electrical demand. Economic advantages of CAES may be realized by storing inexpensive off-peak power at night and on weekends for use during peak hours when electricity prices are high (arbitrage). Traditional CAES facilities use a natural gas burner to heat the air entering the expander. This study examines the feasibility of replacing the natural gas burner with heat exchangers that collect waste heat from the compression cycle and designing an advanced adiabatic compressed air energy storage process that eliminates the need for combustion. This feasibility study will include the development of a software package called CAES Simulator using the commercial program Matlab©, to model thermodynamic properties of a CAES system. The computational model uses a time series iterative forward differencing method to simulate the operation of a CAES plant. Users enter boundary conditions pertaining to ambient air properties and equipment limitations and CAES Simulator calculates thermodynamic properties of the system such as overall efficiency and thermal loads. CAES Simulator is equipped to consider the psychometric properties of air and the effects of humidity changes caused by condensation during cooling.