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Research area 3: Thermodynamic-mathematical process and systems analysis

The energy industry is the sector with the highest greenhouse gas emissions both in Germany and worldwide. On the way to a climate-neutral electricity economy, the sustainable generation of electricity from renewable energies is considered a key technology. Unfortunately, the widespread use of renewable energy still faces several challenges, one of the most serious being the unsteady and localized nature of its availability. This places managing the temporal and geographic mismatch between renewable energy supply and demand at the centre of a successful carbon-neutral electricity economy. Large-scale, transportable, and storable energy storage, which can be provided by chemical energy sources, is needed as a key component to solving this problem.

In the context of the transdisciplinary Clean Circles cluster project, research is being conducted regarding an innovative climate-neutral energy cycle that uses iron as a storable and transportable chemical energy carrier. Electrical energy from renewable sources is stored in iron and can be converted back into electricity by thermochemical oxidation (e.g. in retrofitted coal-fired power plants) at another location and at a different time than the storage process.

The overall evaluation of the Clean Circles process must take technical, ecological, economic and political-social criteria into account. A prerequisite for this multi-criteria evaluation is the holistic analysis of the overall system based on a thermodynamic-mathematical model. Within the scope of this subproject, all relevant process steps of the system are described using thermodynamic methods to model all associated material, energy and exergy flows. The explicit modelling of the exergy flows allows an exergetic evaluation of the entire system and individual components, which will be used to determine the causes and locations of thermodynamic losses. Based on this evaluation, the exergetic analysis can be combined with an economic analysis in the form of an exergoeconomic analysis, which provides initial estimates of the costs for the overall system.

Clean Circles website