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Corresponding Author

Soliman, A.

Subject Area

Mechanical Power Engineering

Article Type

Original Study

Abstract

The usage of phase change materials to store heat in the form of latent heat is increased, because large quantity of thermal energy is stored in smaller volumes. A cylindrical thermal storage device is composed of an inner aluminum pipe having inner/outer diameter of 20/30 mm and length of 1000 mm. The pipe passes through a cylindrical storage device have a radius of 300 mm, fill with paraffin wax. In the present work, a numerical study of the effects of convection, number of fins and heating surface temperature on the storage characteristics of annular latent heat energy storage system (LHESS) using the CFD software FLUENT6.3.26. The results show that the effect of convection cannot be neglected, but it decreases when the space between fins decreases which occurs when numbers of fins increase. The heat transfer increases as the number fins increases and found that after 12 hours the rate of energy stored increased to 116.5% and 89.6% and 89.6% for 3 fins, 8 fins and 13 fins respectively. The temperature of heating surface is not required only to be greater than the melting point of PCM (paraffin wax) When increased to (T= 375K, 400K) found that it reduces the storage time energy to three and four hours while it is six and a half hours in the case of heating surface temperature of (T= 350 K) and increases the stored energy in the PCM to (114.4%)

Keywords

CFD; phase change material; heat transfer; LHESS

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