Investigation of Charging and Discharging Process in a Rotating Latent Heat Storage

Renewable energy has become increasing popular to ease the global reliance on fossil fuels. Among the emerging renewable energies, solar energy is one of the favourable ones. However, the intermittent nature of solar energy has hindered the wide application of it. Energy storage is required to improve the reliability of this energy source. Among the energy storage, latent heat thermal energy storage (LHTES) is desirable due to its capability to store a large amount of energy with minimum temperature rise. However, poor heat transfer performance is the drawback of the LHTES system. Rotation of LHTES system is proposed to alleviate this situation. In this study, rotation of an LHTES system is examined numerically. The heat transfers between the heat transfer fluid (HTF) and the phase change material (PCM) is solved using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The results reveal that the rotating LHTES system improves the heat transfer performance. Further analysis of the results discloses that low rotational speed offers the best improvement in heat transfer performance during charging and discharging process. Nevertheless, further research and experimentation are needed to determine the optimum rotational speed and also a commercially viable design for rotating LHTES system.