Enhanced the Solidification of the Phase Change Material in the Horizontal Latent Heat Thermal Energy Storage by Using Rectangular Plate and Circular Disc Plate Fins by using CFD

Abstract

One important solution for societies to overcome the energy crisis is to manage the production and storage of energy. In this regard, the latent heat energy storage systems have recently gained a remarkable attention. Hence, this work is devoted to enhance performance of a latent heat tube-shell storage system by using novel rectangular plate fins and circular disc plate fins with different geometrical characteristics. Different number of vanes have been employed on the fins. The different cases studied include the cases with double-fin, quadruple-fin, quintuple fin, and sextuple fins. These fins have been employed to augment heat transfer from a low temperature fluid to the PCM inside the shell container during the solidification process. To model the phase change, the enthalpy-porosity technique has been adopted. Various parameters have been used to assess the functionality of the system including the solidification process at time of 4000s, solid fraction evolution, solid fraction contours, temperature contours and etc. The results demonstrated that the case 4 (sextuple fins case) took the advantage in heat transfer augmentation and discharging process while the case with double twisted-fin showed the worst performance. The results indicated that fin length is not the only influencing factor and fin number also has a dominant role.