SUMMARY

The field of thermal energy storage has many different uses and applications, and is divided into sensible storage and latent storage. Much of the current research on sensible storage is focused on how it can be used to store energy generated by renewable sources and later use that energy for power generation. This thesis considers the use of a novel energy storage material for sensible energy storage in a space cooling application. Using a thermal storage device allows the shifting of the cooling load for a building to a different period of the day where the vapor compression refrigeration system is less expensive and more efficient.

In order to determine the feasibility of such a system, several pieces of information are required. The first is the performance of a conventional, unmodified system. This design and analysis is done using Engineering Equation Solver software. Next, a heat transfer analysis is performed to determine how the thermal storage component would behave during cooling. Using that information, the geometry of the component is optimized and used to determine the performance of the entire system. The total cost, yearly cost and energy savings, and payback period for the system are collected and used to provide insight on the current state of the technology and make recommendations for future work.