Prediction of the main characteristics of the shell and tube bundle latent heat thermal energy storage unit using a shell and single-tube unit

Le-Li Wang, Liang-Bi Wang, Kun Zhang, Ye Wang and Wei-Wei Wang

Applied Energy, 2022, vol. 323, issue C, No S0306261922009357

Abstract: Numerical analysis is an effective method for evaluating the thermal performance and predicting the state of a shell and tube bundle latent heat thermal energy storage (LHTES) unit. However, numerical analysis is time-consuming owing to the unsteady nature of the heat storage process. A small computational domain is required to reduce the computing time. Generally, a shell and single-tube unit is a favorable computational domain. It is necessary to determine the difference between the results of a shell and single-tube unit and a shell and tube bundle unit before this computational domain can be used. Herein, two types of computational domains are selected to identify such differences, namely a shell and single-tube unit and a shell and tube bundle unit. A three-dimensional, unsteady, and fully coupled numerical model is developed. The results obtained using the shell and single-tube unit with uniform wall heat flux and uniform wall temperature are compared with those obtained in the shell and tube bundle unit. The results show that the heat transfer in the shell and tube bundle unit is not adequately reflected by that in the shell and single-tube unit under adiabatic thermal boundary condition. However, by changing the heat flux added to the boundary or uniform wall temperature of the shell and single-tube unit, the principal performance of the shell and tube bundle unit can be accurately modeled using the shell and single-tube unit, particularly after the stored energy reaches its half capacity; the time-averaged relative error of the heat storage performance is below 14.0 %. The shell and tube bundle unit contains 27 tubes in the case studied. If the shell and single-tube unit is used as the numerical domain, the simulation speed can be increased by 96 times.

Keywords: Computational domain; Thermal energy storage; Shell and tube bundle unit; Shell and single-tube unit; Coupled simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2022.119633

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