Liquid air energy storage (LAES) is a promising energy storage technology in consuming renewable energy and electricity grid management. In the baseline LAES (B-LAES), the compression heat is only utilized in heating the inlet air of turbines, and a large amount of compression heat is surplus, leading to a low round-trip efficiency (RTE). In this paper, an integrated energy system based on LAES and the Kalina cycle (KC), called KC-LAES, is proposed and analyzed. In the proposed system, the surplus compression heat is utilized to drive a KC system to generate additional electricity in the discharging process. An energetic model is developed to evaluate the performance of the KC and the KC-LAES. In the analysis of the KC subsystem, the calculation results show that the evaporating temperature has less influence on the performance of the KC-LAES system than the B-LAES system, and the optimal working fluid concentration and operating pressure are 85% and 12 MPa, respectively. For the KC-LAES, the calculation results indicate that the introduction of the KC notably improves the compression heat utilization ratio of the LAES, thereby improving the RTE. With a liquefaction pressure value of eight MPa and an expansion pressure value of four MPa, the RTE of the KC-LAES is 57.18%, while that of the B-LAES is 52.16%.
Keywords: Kalina cycle; heat recovery; liquid air energy storage; thermodynamic analysis.