Natural convection melting of phase change material in corrugated porous cavities

Abstract

In this paper, a numerical study is carried out to examine the melting inside a wavy cavity under partial heating. A wide range of numerical computations have been performed to understand the effect of porosity, pore density, wall waviness, and heater location and intensity on the melting process. The results revealed that lower metal foam porosity resulted in higher melting rate and lower thermal storage capacity. However, pore density indicated no effect on melting performance for porosity in the range 80–96 %. When considering heater location at various porosities, its impact on melting performance is small at low porosity but becomes significant at higher porosity. Top–bottom partial heating can save almost 10 % of the melting time at ɛ = 0.96. Moreover, the PCM can store more energy, i. e. 11.36 %, when the heater location was changed from center or top–bottom position to top or bottom position at ɛ = 0.96. The results further showed that increasing the number of undulations can save 27.4 % of the melting time at ε = 0.96. Therefore, it can be concluded that higher energy storage and melting rate can be achieved by increasing the number of undulations.