New technologies for energy generation, storage and delivery, which are started to be developed in Europe during the last decade, require also the considerable effort in the investigation of new materials for energy systems able to store considerable amount of energy in a small volume for a long period of time avoiding its unexpectable losses. This becomes more important when one speaks about energy polygeneration approach, where separate materials for storage and delivery of the electric and thermal energies have to be integrated in one system, and for targeted delivery of bioenergy for bio-inspired synthetic technology platforms (biofactories). There is also a major problem of storage over times between hours and months with the possibility to release or additionally uptake entrapped energy on demand. Corresponding materials have to provide high safety, control, be cheap and reusable. Despite several successful examples of commercialisation of the energy storage materials, in particular for storage of electric energy, the continues research work exists both inside EU as well as in USA and Japan in order to improve energy storage, to miniaturise the materials achieving high energy and controlled release and uptake capacities, to eliminate wasting energy and, finally, to make new materials flexible in terms of delivery of different amounts and types of energies and use of complex energy storage systems.
ENERCAPSULE project contributes to the development of a novel generation of energy storage materials by applying nanoencapsulation approach to the energy-enriched materials for control over the energy uptake and release on demand, to decrease the size of the energy storage unit to nanometre range. In order to demonstrate high versatility and applicability of the proposed scientific goals, two target groups of energy storage materials are chosen, in each of them the nanoencapsulation will foresee application advances and added scientific value from energy-enriched materials in nanoconfined environment and complex storage systems: i) Heat storage materials ii) Materials for delivery of bioenergy (ATP and polyphosphoric acids).
