SELECTION OF PHASE CHANGE MATERIAL FOR DOMESTIC WATER HEATING USING MULTI CRITERIA DECISION APPROACH

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Selection of appropriate phase change material in the field of domestic water heating system is a difficult task due to the availability of the variety of an enormous number of different materials. The researcher’s primary objective is a selection of the desired PCM, which will give the best thermal performance of the domestic water heating latent heat storage system. The paper reports the selection of phase change material with three multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods with conflicting and different objectives. An analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and entropy methods are used to determine the importance criteria weights. For selection purpose, the TOPSIS (Technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution), VIKOR (Vise KriterijumskaOptimizacijaKompromisnoResenje), and EXPROM2 methods were used, which gives ranking to the alternatives using compromised weight obtained by AHP and entropy methods. This MCDM technique provides a list of all desirable options from the best to the worst suitable materials. Depending on the rankings obtained, the best PCM was found to be the Sodium acetate trihydrate (90%) + graphite (10%), Stearic acid and n-Hexacosane at the given criteria due to its higher physical, chemical, and thermal properties than other alternative PCM materials. The results obtained showed that these methods are feasible tool for the Selection of the best-suited phase change material and can be applied to any material selection decision-making problem to find the best materials.