Effect of heat source direction on the thermal performance of phase change material (PCM) based thermal control module (TCM) under the influence of low gravity environment

Abstract

For improving thermal management of electronic components/detectors, a novel phase change material based thermal control module is investigated to analyze the effect of heat source direction on the melting and solidification of PCM in a three-dimensional domain under the influence of low gravity environment. A distinctive method of inverting the PCM-based TCM against gravity is proposed to analyze the direction of heat source in two cases (non-inverted and inverted). The melting of PCM is simulated at different gravitational acceleration values (i.e., g, g/2, g/10, g/20, g/40, g/80) for both the inverted and non-inverted cases. The enthalpy-porosity method is employed to investigate the melting and solidification processes. The results show that inverting the heat source direction significantly affects the thermal performance of the PCM-based TCM. The maximum and minimum difference in the average liquid fraction value between the two cases is observed to be 13.63% and <2% at (g) and (g/80). The difference in the source temperature between the inverted and non-inverted cases varies between 3.3% to 19.68% when the gravitational acceleration increases from g/80 to g. The minuscule discrepancy (< 3%) in average liquid fraction indicates that the solidification of PCM is minimally affected by inverting heat flow direction.