Abstract
Herein, free cooling an application of thermal energy storage is investigated through theoretical observations of air being cooled after passing over encapsulated phase change material (PCM). The impact of encapsulation geometry changes from circular to; rectangular, square, and elliptical shapes is studied for the PCM solidification and melting cycles. The study is performed for sp24, sp26, and sp29 PCM types with and without the inclusion of CuO and Al2O3 nanoparticles (NPs). A transient mathematical model for heat transfer behavior of airflow over the encapsulation is constructed and solved using Ansys 20.2 software. It is found that the rectangular-shaped PCM encapsulation with CuO nano-enhanced PCM has the shortest complete melting (~ 1–2 h) and complete solidification times (~ 3–9.3 h). Nanoparticle enhancement improves the rate of melting by a maximum of 11.56% with Al2O3 NPs and by 6.12% with CuO NPs at an inlet airflow temperature of 313 K. A maximum outlet air-temperature drop of ~ 3.1 K occurs in the cylindrical geometry with CuO nano-enhancement and the highest Nusselt number is obtained at similar conditions. From this study it is recommended to use either sp24 or sp26 PCMs mixed with nano-alumina and encapsulated within rectangular containers for free cooling applications.
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