Heat transfer enhancement of phase change composite material: Copper foam/paraffin

Changhong Wang, Tao Lin, Na Li and Huanpei Zheng

Renewable Energy, 2016, vol. 96, issue PA, 960-965

Abstract: Phase change materials (PCM) can store heat during the phase change process. Because foam metal is light-weight, has a large specific surface area and conducts heat well, we chose it as a test material. The phase change material paraffin was embedded in copper foam metal to form composite phase change materials. We constructed a platform to test the thermophysical properties of pure paraffin and the composite materials, and the paraffin and composite phase change materials were processed using numerical simulations to analyze their phase change process. For these simulations, the Fluent software with Solidification/Melting and Porous Zone model was used. The results showed that copper foam can effectively improve the internal heat transfer uniformity of paraffin, reduce the heat storage time of paraffin wax by 40%, and improve the relationship between the total phase transition time and the heating boundary temperature in the copper/paraffin composite phase change materials.

Keywords: Foam copper; Phase change composite material; Heat transfer characteristic; Heat storage performance; Numerical simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014811630341X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:96:y:2016:i:pa:p:960-965

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2016.04.039

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().