“…The application of fluidized beds to sensible heat storage has been experimentally investigated, and it has been shown that a fluidized bed behaves similar to a well-mixed tank with negligible variations in the temperature along the bed (Elsayed et al, 1988;El-Refaee et al, 1988;Megahed et al, 1988;Izquierdo-Barrientos et al, 2013Mahfoudi et al, 2015). For this reason, when the bed is coupled with a solar collector, packed beds are preferred because stratification permits an increase in the thermal efficiency of the solar collection system, as was explained in Section 2.1. and observed a heat transfer coefficient between 500 and 900 W/(m 2 K) for fluidization velocities up to 1.6 u mf .…”