Adsorptive transformation and storage of renewable heat: Review of current trends in adsorption dynamics

The main shortage of emerging technology of adsorptive transformation and storage (ATS) of heat is a low specific power that leads to large-size units poorly competitive so far with common compression systems. Significant intensification of heat and mass transfer in ATS units would allow an overcoming of this drawback. This is especially urgent for transformations driven by renewable heat sources for the following reasons: (i) the driving temperature is low, hence temperature losses in adsorbent - heat exchanger unit must be strictly minimized; (ii) solar heat can be highly variable in time, therefore good desorption dynamics is very important to accept high insolation regimes; (iii) the rate of heat recovery during winter time is essentially restricted by low vapour pressure in an evaporator coupled to the ambient. Current trends of ATS dynamic optimization are considered in the manuscript.