Heating and refrigeration with regenerative energies and heat transformers

Solar water heating is a wide-spread means of providing hot water or just supporting heating equipment. Selective (colored) optical absorber layers are developed for improving on the collectors used while enhanced antireflection layers, composite materials for lighter collectors and new types of anti-soiling layers are the object of current developments.

However, it is not only important to provide heat, but also refrigeration since a major component of the expected increase in global thermal power requirements will be in this area. A potential driving factor for thermodynamic refrigerating processes will be solar heat with sorption or adsorption techniques. Sorbents and heat exchangers for these purposes are being developed.

Heat transformers using sorbents as working media (i. e., ad- and absorption heat pumps) are on the agenda of material development in analogy to thermodynamic refrigerating processes.

Thermal reservoirs

A series of applications in thermal power will make it important to store thermal energy with low-loss in the medium term. Material research is following up promising directions, one of which will be coming up with phase change materials allowing effective energy storage in low-temperature ranges based upon new types of (micro) encapsulation methods. Another approach is thermochemical reservoirs applying ad- and absorption materials.

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