IEA SHC Solar Academy: Material and Component Development for Thermal Energy Storage - Task 58

Bärbel Epp is the founder and managing director of the German consultancy solrico – solar market research & international communication. She is responsible for the international newsletter on the web portal www.solarthermalworld.org, reporting exclusively about market and technology trends in the solar heating and cooling sector. solrico also published the first World Map of SHIP suppliers (SHIP = Solar Heat for Industrial Processes) see www.solar-payback.com/suppliers and carries out surveys among the around 80 companies listed on the world map. Since three years Bärbel Epp is also author of the SHC chapter of the Annual Global Status Report on Renewables published by REN21.

Wim van Helden studied physics at the Eindhoven University of Technology, where he also did his PhD work on Energy Technology. For 11 years, he was responsible for the group on Thermal Systems in the Built Environment of the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands, ECN. After that, he started his own consultancy activities in the field of renewable heat. He now works with AEE INTEC, Austria, since 2014 and is responsible for the Thermal Energy Storages group. He leads a number of international and national R&D projects on compact and large scale thermal energy storage technologies and is active in the European Technology and Innovation Platform on Renewable Heating and Cooling.

Christoph Rathgeber has been working as a research assistant in the Thermal Energy Storage group at ZAE Bayern (Bavarian Institute for Applied Energy Research) in Germany since 2012. His main research topic is latent heat storage with PCM. As a PhD student, he focusses on the calculation of solid-liquid phase diagrams of salt-water systems in order to develop new PCM. Christoph has been participating in the IEA Task on material development for compact thermal energy storage since 2013.

Benjamin Fumey is a research engineer and PhD candidate at the Swiss Federal Institute for Material Science and Technology (Empa) in Dübendorf, Switzerland, and Subtask leader of the combined IEA SHC Task 58 / ECES Annex 33 “Material And Component Development For Thermal Energy Storage”. He holds a Swiss electrical engineering degree and has more than 12 years of R&D experience in storage of renewable energy. Present focus areas of his research are components and systems for sorption based inter seasonal thermal storage for building application and catalytic hydrogen combustion for building internal heating and cooking application.