Eventos Anais de eventos
ENCIT 2018
Brazilian Congress of Thermal Sciences and Engineering
HEAT TRANSFER WITH PHASE CHANGE AROUND FINNED TUBE SUBMERSED IN PCM
Submission Author:
Felipe Silva dos Santos , MG , Brazil
Co-Authors:
Felipe Silva dos Santos, Kamal Ismail, Fátima Lino
Presenter: Felipe Silva dos Santos
doi://10.26678/ABCM.ENCIT2018.CIT18-0085
Abstract
Phase change materials are occupying a leading position in many applications especially in energy storage, thermal insulation and many other applications. Although most preferred among other thermal storage materials because of their high capacity for energy storage and nearly isothermal behavior during charging and discharging processes they are penalized due to their low thermal conductivity and consequently the difficulty in transferring heat to them or retrieving stored energy from them. This led to intensify research activities to investigate means for increasing the PCM effective thermal conductivity and enhance heat transfer rates during the process of charging and discharging. One of these methods is the use of extended surfaces or finned tubes. The present paper presents the results of a numerical and experimental investigation on a finned tube submersed in liquid PCM at its phase change temperature while a cold fluid at lower temperature flows inside the finned tube. A conduction model is used to represent the heat transfer process with phase change using the enthalpy method and finite difference scheme. The home-built numerical code is developed, tested, optimized and validated against experimental results. It is then used to predict the interface position, interface velocity and the time for complete phase change. The numerical predictions are found to agree reasonably well with the experimental result. Fins are found to increase the interface position, solidified PCM mass, and interface velocity and to decrease the time for complete phase change of the PCM.
Keywords
phase change, energy storage, finned tube, Interface velocity, Time for complete phase change
