Experimental investigation on heat transport in gravel-sand materials

The project is a basic study on the expected thermal behaviour of gravel storage initiated as a part of a research and demonstration gravel storage for seasonal heat storage.The goal of the investigation is to determine the heat transfer between heat pipes and sand-gravel storage media by carrying out in a small size experiment.

The experiment consists of a highly insulated box filled with two kinds of sand material crossed by a plastic heat pipe. Heat transfer is measured under dry and water satured conditions in a cross-section.The conclusions are clear. To obtain necessary heat conduction in sand-gravel material, the storage media is to be water satured.

In this case, handling of such material on site is rather complex. The conduction is highly dependent on the thermal properties of the storage media and so is the overall thermal performance of a storage applying such media. For sandy media no convectional heat transport is found. It would be relevant to extend the investigation to media that enables convectional heat transport.

A last conclusion is that such experiments, necessary for proper designing of sand-gravel storage types, are a very cheap form of collecting information about the expected behaviour of large storage systems.