Heat Transfer Performance of a Rotating Phase Change Material (PCM) based Thermal Energy Storage (TES)

The objective of this project is to investigate the heat transfer performance of a rotating phase change material (PCM) based thermal energy storage (TES). Paraffin wax are used as the phase change material in a horizontal cylindrical acrylic capsule while water bath as the heat transfer fluid passing through the paraffin wax in a copper tube. During charging process, the solid paraffin wax start to melt and the latent heat released being stored. The heat transferred during the natural convection only occurred at the top section of the horizontal cylindrical capsule causing it to limit the amount of heat transfer stored. By proposing to rotate the horizontal cylindrical capsule, the idea is to spread the heat transfer uniformly to the top and bottom of the cylindrical capsule. There are two objectives of this study; to develop a computational model of heat transfer in a phase change material (PCM) based thermal energy storage (TES) and to investigate and evaluate the heat transfer performance of a rotating PCM-TES design. The models for PCM-TES is developed, validated and then utilized to evaluate the key parameters that affect the heat transfer performance. The numerical predictions achieved relatively good agreement with experimental counterpart obtained from literature of the previous study. It is found that heat transfer performance of rotating thermal energy storage is better than static thermal energy storage.