Influence of longitudinal fin arrangement on the melting and solidification inside the triplex tube latent heat thermal storage system

Abstract

A two-dimensional melting/solidification model of Phase Change Material (PCM) is developed. The present research has studied the novel PCM based Triplex Tube Latent Heat Storage System (TTLHSS). The primary target of this research is to establish the effect of longitudinal fins on the performance of both melting and solidification rate of PCM. Initially, melting and solidification enhancement with four longitudinal fins are studied, and 60% and 46.15% reduction are observed in melting and solidification time. Then, the arrangement of fins inside TTLHSS is studied, and it is found that TTLHSS with three fins in the bottom portion can be more effective for melting enhancement. However, three fins in the bottom portion are not found beneficial for solidification enhancement. Then, instead of straight fins, l-shaped longitudinal fins are studied and found almost similar enhancement in melting as straight fins. At the same time, a 2–5% reduction in solidification time is observed with l-shaped fins. For further improvement, a greater number of fins with small lengths are examined. The fin volume remains the same in this case of eight fins and found good improvement in the melting and solidification processes. In short, three different parameters, fin arrangement, fin shape, and a number of fins are studied in current research. The case with a greater number of fins with reduced length is found maximum effective. The arrangement with eight fins (in which bottom fin length is increased with compensation of reduced side fin length) is found most effective with a 60.77% reduction in combined melting-solidification duration.