The investigations on the heat transfer in thermal energy storage with time-dependent heat flux for power plants

Yutao Huo, Jianhua Zong and Zhonghao Rao

Energy, 2019, vol. 175, issue C, 1209-1221

Abstract: The latent thermal energy storage (LTES) using phase change material (PCM) is able to improve the efficiency of power plants. However, the convectional TES using constant heat flux will reduce the ratio latent heat, leading to the higher temperature at the end of energy storage and more cost of heat preservation (more expensive material and thicker wall of enclosure). Consequently, the LTES with two energy storage tanks are proposed. The heating method is simplified as time-dependent heat flux boundary and the effects of periods, Rayleigh numbers and amplifications are studied numerically. The results show that the time-dependent scheme can reduce the final average temperature of PCM. However, the total melting time is nearly twice as much as that of constant scheme when the amplification is 1.0. In order to enhance the heat transfer, the heat flux applied to the TES is enlarged with amplification factor. When the amplification is 2.0, the latent heat gets energy from sensible heat and the temperature difference between wall and adjacent PCM is larger. As a result, the total melting time is decreased compared with the constant scheme.

Keywords: Solid-liquid phase change; Thermal energy storage; Lattice Boltzmann; Time-dependent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544219305699
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:energy:v:175:y:2019:i:c:p:1209-1221

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2019.03.149

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

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