Numerical simulation study of the effect of mechanical vibration on heat transfer in a six-fin latent heat thermal energy storage unit

Abstract

The optimization of heat transfer in latent heat thermal energy storage units (LHTES) has received a lot of research during the past decade, and the use of fins to enhance heat transfer in phase change materials (PCM) is one of the efficient ways. However, the existing studies do not consider the influence of mechanical vibration which widely exists in LHTES. To fill the research gap in this important topic, a horizontal shell-and-tube six-fin latent heat thermal energy storage unit is investigated in this study, and the effects of mechanical vibration are investigated by numerically simulating the PCM charging process in LHTES using the Enthalpy-porosity technique. In this paper, the charging rate of PCM, variation of key parameters such as Nusselt number, temperature and liquid fraction are analyzed in detail under vibration conditions. And the following conclusions can be obtained. (1) Mechanical vibration can significantly increase the charging rate of PCM, under the condition of vibration amplitude of 10mm and frequency of 1Hz (the melting time of PCM is reduced by 46.6%). (2) The enhancement effect of mechanical vibration on the melting rate of PCM increases with the increase of amplitude and frequency, but the enhancement efficiency keeps decreasing. These observations result from that the mechanical vibration changes the velocity of the liquid PCM, so the forced convective heat transfer of the PCM is significantly enhanced. Furthermore, the melting process of PCM is sensitively affected by increasing the amplitude than by increasing the frequency. Increasing the amplitude or frequency alone (amplitude from 10mm to 40mm; frequency from 1Hz to 4Hz) can reduce the total melting time of PCM by 75% and 68.7%, respectively.