Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2019
25th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
NUMERICAL STUDY OF AN ICE THERMAL ENERGY STORAGE TANK FOR SMALL SCALE APPLICATIONS
Submission Author:
THIAGO TORRES MARTINS ROCHA , MG
Co-Authors:
THIAGO TORRES MARTINS ROCHA, Cleison Henrique de Paula, Iuri Torres, Tiago de Freitas Paulino, Raphael Nunes Nunes de Oliveira
Presenter: THIAGO TORRES MARTINS ROCHA
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2019.COB2019-0782
Abstract
Thermal energy storage (TES) has been a proven technology to help reducing the costs associated with the electricity consumption in refrigeration systems. Besides the typical large-scale applications (e.g. air conditioning in buildings), the TES demonstrated to be a useful tool even in relatively small systems, such as domestic refrigerators. In an ice TES system, the ice tank is one of the most important aspects to analyze. Many works have been made to evaluate the performance of such thanks, but considering big capacities (20-350 kWh). In the present study, an external melt ice-on-coil tank is proposed for small scale applications, with 2.5 kWh of thermal capacity. The ice formation in tank is numerically simulated in a commercial finite element software. To give the initial inputs, the process of water solidification around a single tube was analyzed. Then, based on the presented assumptions, the tank dimensions were established, considering the cost of materials usually employed. The model was checked comparing a simulation with another numerical study, but experimentally validated. The results for the tank simulation indicated the influence of the heat gain from ambient, as well as the interaction between neighboring tubes in the ice formation. The proposed model and the adopted methodology can be considered as a good approximation to study an ice-on coil tank for small scale applications.
Keywords
Thermal Energy Storage, ice tank, small-scale, Simulation
