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Subject Area

Mechanical Power Engineering

Article Type

Original Study

Abstract

The current work is a heat exchanger (H.EX) incorporating several oval capsules filled with PCM as staggered bundles in a shell. Through the charging process, the PCM, initially at 299 K, is heated by passing a cross flow of hot water in the upward direction by a value of 343K. After complete melting, the solidification process is started by passing water at a temperature of 283 K. The proposed unit is studied with different rows (3, and 5 rows), and columns (3, and 5 columns), including 8, 13, 14, and 23 capsules. The number of rows and columns gets four configurations (3 rows × 3 columns, 3 rows × 5 columns, 5 rows × 3 columns, and 5 rows × 5 columns). The staggered bundle configurations were established to study the optimum case by calculating, PCM temperature, stored energy, and the melting, solidification, and overall exergy. The results showed that the total melting and solidification time increases with the number of columns due to the increase in the number of capsules and that increases the amount of PCM. The exergy efficiency increases with the number of capsules at the same number of columns compared to the case of increasing the row numbers. The highest values of the melting, solidification, and overall exergy efficiencies are 69.21 %, 23.85 %, and 16.52 %, respectively, which occurred in the case of 5 rows × 3 columns with 13 capsules.

Keywords

Numerical analysis, HTF, PCM, melting and solidification, bundle capsules

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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