A study on energy storage materials for PV based thermal energy storage

Recent years have seen a huge demand in Energy due to the industrial revolution and urbanization. Though most of the energy need is compensated by fossil fuel which leads to depreciation in underground resources for fossil fuel. Also the major concern for utilizing the fossil fuel is releasing of CO2 in the atmosphere causing global warming. The aforementioned concern around the fossil fuel has seen a shift in dependency towards the renewable energy sources such as Solar, Wind, and Water etc. Although renewable sources of energy are very clean and abundantly available in nature but the intermittent behavior of these energy source create a huge mismatch between the energy demand and energy supply. To bridge these above gap, Thermal energy storage plays a pivotal element role which stores energy by heating and cooling of storage media. In this paper we will analyses the various storage materials and their suitable characteristics which influence the duration of the storage also their constrains while deploying in commercial plants. The various types storage media comes under Sensible Heat Storage such as Water, Concrete, Sand, Rock, Molten salt etc. are reviewed. Along with SHS, Latent Heat Storage materials which are also called Phase change materials such as Paraffin, Eutectics, Inorganic materials are also discussed in this paper. The discussed analysis presented in this paper may be helpful to carry out future research.