Performance Analysis of a Compressed Humid Air Energy Storage System

With the growing need for the use of electricity, power plants sometimes cannot generate enough power during the high demand periods. Thus various methods are introduced to solve this situation. Compressed air energy storage (CAES) technology seems to be a good solution to both peaking power demand and intermittent energy utilization transformed from renewable energy source like wind energy. Utilization of heat generated from the air compression process is a crucial problem of this technology. A compressed air energy storage system, with humid air as working fluid, is designed in this paper. In this system, heat of compressing air is transformed to the latent heat of water vapour, decreasing the power consumption of compressor and increasing energy generated per volume of storage. A Compressed Humid Air Energy Storage (CHAES) system model is established in this paper to simulate the performance of this system. Then the performance of this new system is evaluated by comparison to conventional CAES system, based on the simulation result. The result of this paper confirm the growing interest to CAES as a solution to peaking power demand and intermittent energy utilization, and indicates that CHAES system, as a great improvement of CAES system, has huge potential in the future.