Estudo numérico da mudança de fase de PCMs em cavidades cilíndricas

Abstract

Several residential, commercial and industrial applications focused on thermal management have their operating costs reduced when a thermal energy storage system is incorporated to them. This type of system can provide, can, for example, absorb thermal energy from solar source, heat reuse from industrial process or even from electrical power (during the time this is less expensive) and release it at a time that these heat sources are not present and the electrical power, if used, would be more expensive.The Phase Change Materials (PCMs), due to their high latent heat of fusion, are materials that represent a viable alternative to the implementation of thermal energy storage systems. However, many PCMs have not had their characteristics and fluid dynamics properties sufficiently investigated. Thus, this paper presents a numerical study of RT phase change materials family, inside cylindrical cavities, aiming at the thermal energy storage trough latent heat (LHTES). The study was conducted through a CFD numerical simulation, with ANSYS Fluent software. The numeric model adopted is two-dimensional and is composed by mass conservation, movement amount and energy equations. In addition, the enthalpy-porosity modeling technique was used. The computational mesh is hexaedric, with refinement along the walls of geometry and at the interface area between the PCM and air. The model was validated with numerical and experimental results available in the literature, achieving good results. The fusion process of five different PCMs (RT 4, RT 35, RT 35 HC (high capacity), RT 55 and RT 82) was evaluated, each one of them with three temperature ranges (T= 10, 20 e 30 °C). Furthermore, for T=10 °C, the PCMs RT 27, RT 35, RT 35 HC and RT 82 were tested for five different values of C constant (Mushy Zone) totaling thirty different situations. For PCMs RT 4, RT 35, RT 55 and RT 82, increasing T from 10 oC to 20 oC and from 10 oC to 30 oC, for liquid fraction between 0,4 and 0,8, the average reduction in fusion time were, approximately, 55.8% and 71.8% and the average increase in heat flow were 63% and 111% respectively. For RT 35 HC, the average reductions in fusion time were 51.6% and 67.8% for the same liquid fraction range and same T. The RT 35 HC, when compared to RT 35, has latent heat of fusion 41.1% greater and its fusion times are between 100% to 134% greater, depending on T used.