Experimental Evaluation of Dewar Volume and Cryocooler Cold Finger Size in a Small-Scale Stirling Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES) System

This paper uses an experimental approach to evaluate two design characteristics for a liquid air energy storage (LAES) and generation system as part of the design analysis for a microgrid power system. The system evaluated utilized a Stirling engine based cryocooler that employs a coldfinger placed into a Dewar. Using a design of experiments, the cold finger surface area and Dewar volume were evaluated to determine the criticality and significance of changing their dimensions. Evaluations were made against the total liquid air production mass and average liquid air production rate during the experiments. This analysis found that changing the surface area of the cryocooler cold finger was a statistically significant design characteristic that affected total liquid air production and average production rate while changing the volume of the Dewar was not statistically significant. Additional responses relative to the time when the first gram of liquid air was produced and the minimum cold tip temperature that the cryocooler was able to achieve provided additional insight into design characteristics that can be used to inform the engineer when making design tradeoffs for specific operational environments.