Solidification acceleration of phase change material in a horizontal latent heat thermal energy storage system by using spiral fins

Abstract

One important solution for societies to overcome the energy crisis is to manage the production and storage of energy. In this regard, the latent heat energy storage systems have recently gained a remarkable attention. Hence, this work is devoted to enhance performance of a latent heat tube-shell storage system by using novel spiral fins with different geometrical characteristics. Different number of vanes have been employed on the fins with constant twisting pitch. The different cases studied include the cases with single-fin, double-fin, triple-fin and quadruple-fin. These fins have been employed to augment heat transfer from a low temperature fluid to the PCM inside the shell container during the solidification process. To model the phase change, the enthalpy-porosity technique has been adopted. Various parameters have been used to assess the functionality of the system including the Nusselt number, total solidification time, temperature, solid fraction evolution, solid fraction contours, temperature contours and etc. The results demonstrated that the triple-fin and double-fin cases took the advantage in heat transfer augmentation and discharging process while the case with single-fin showed the worst performance. The results indicated that fin number is not the only influencing factor and fin length also has a dominant role.