STORIES

The “European Green Deal” is a set of policy initiatives aiming at ensuring the EU becomes climate neutral by 2050. These policy initiatives have strong implications for the energy sector, and for the energy storage sector in particular. New energy storage technologies will supply more flexibility and balance in the grid, providing a back-up to intermittent renewable energy and contribute to seasonal energy storage challenges. Above all, the main challenge for energy storage development is economic.

To address these challenges, StoRIES project brings together a consortium of beneficiaries like ESFRI facilities (European Strategy Forum on Research Facilities), technology institutes, universities and industrial partners to jointly improve the economic performance of storage technologies. Members of the European Energy Research Alliance (EERA) and the European Association for Storage of Energy (EASE) have a long-term history of co-operating with each other and are establishing the core of this world-class European ecosystem.

In this big consortium, ISTO offers the services of the Nano-Microfluidic laboratory (NanoµLab) with high-resolution imaging and metrology techniques for micro-nanofluidic experiments to reproduce a two-dimensional representation of a porous medium fitted for direct visualization of flows, reactions, and transport mechanisms at the pore-scale. The platform allows studying geological porous media at the pore-scale with a focus on physico-chemical processes: Fluid-rock interactions, interfacial processes, multiphase flow, dissolution/precipitation processes, phase changes. Pore-scale numerical modelling is used mostly to simulate flow and transport in images of the samples to characterize its continuum scale properties.