Effect of fins with unequal length on the performance of cylindrical latent heat storage system

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, the melting and solidification characteristics of RT35 in vertical cylindrical latent heat storage system with annular fins are studied. The unequal fin length arrangements are proposed with constant fins volume. In order to evaluate the performance of the heat storage system, taking the structure of fins with equal length as reference, the growth rate is proposed (sum of heat storage and release increment and heat storage and release time reduction). The results show that the proposed initial optimized structures can improve the melting process, to further improve the thermal performance, the method of partition is proposed for quadratic optimization. It is found that the quadratic optimized structures show superior thermal performance in both melting and solidification processes. When the partition number is four, the growth rates in melting and solidification process are 29.91% and 13.15% respectively. Additionally, a correlation is developed to predict the total melting time which will be useful for the design of the fins in the latent heat storage system.