Assessment of a novel technology for a stratified hot water energy storage - The water snake

The increasing demand to enhance sustainability and reduce carbon emission and pollution is attracting the attention for implementing and integrating diverse heating technologies such as heat pumps, solar energy, gas boilers, Combined Heat and Power (CHP), and electric heaters. Integrated technologies for heating include low and high temperature district heating, domestic small-scale applications and commercial large-scale buildings. Energy from flooded coalmines and water from other sources could also play a vital role in improving energy efficiency of heating and cooling applications. Stratified thermal storage are likely to significantly contribute to energy efficient heating, particularly when implementing a mixed-approach of diverse technologies. A stratified hot water tank, and naturally stratified reservoirs, are expected to play a central role in the integration of several heating technologies that operate efficiently at different levels of temperature with reduced cost. This paper presents a new innovative technology to improve stratification, namely 'the water snake', and an automated test rig to evaluate the new stratification method for energy utilisation using energy storage of hot water. An automated system is utilised to evaluate the performance. The results indicate that the test rig has been successful for the automated testing of the technology. Moreover, the results show that the water snake, as a new technology for stratification, is successful in minimising mixing and turbulence inside the thermal energy storage. The results prove that the technology could be implemented for a wide range of applications to enhance the efficiency of heating systems in buildings as well as district heating and cooling applications.