Experimental and numerical study on the effect of the intelligent memory metal fin on the melting and solidification process of PCM

Yang Xu, Chen He, Yang Chen, Yu Sun, Hang Yin and Zhang-Jing Zheng

Renewable Energy, 2023, vol. 218, issue C

Abstract: The complete melting and solidification time of the phase change thermal storage system is one of the key performance parameters. However, the phase change material (PCM) has the weakness of poor heat transfer properties. Furthermore, PCM has different heat transfer mechanisms during melting and solidification. Therefore, this paper proposes the intelligent memory metal fin for the square cavity phase change thermal storage unit to enhance PCM melting and solidification process. This study uses a combination of numerical calculations as well as experimental studies. The structure of the intelligent memory metal fin is optimized. The experimental results show 28.6% reduction in the complete melting time of the PCM using the intelligent memory metal fin compared to the use of the straight fin. In addition, the simulations are validated experimentally to improve the accuracy of the numerical simulations. The simulation results show that the melting and solidification time decreases with the increase in the length of the intelligent memory metal fin. Compared with the fin dimensionless length of 0.75, the complete melting and solidification time at 0.95 are reduced by 34.14% and 28.27%, respectively. However, as the fin length increases during the melting process, the percentage increase in efficiency decreases. The complete melting time decreases by 17.9% and 4.2% for fin lengths from 0.8 to 0.85 and 0.85 to 0.9. Considering the amount of fin and the amount of PCM, the optimum fin dimensionless length for this model is 0.85. Variations in fin deflection affect the melting process of the PCM. The complete melting time is reduced by 4.6% and increased by 1% when the fin deflection goes from 0.6 to 0.7 and 0.7 to 0.8, respectively. Hence, there is an optimum deflection for the intelligent memory metal fin deformation process to obtain the fastest melting rate. The optimum fin deflection for this simulation is a dimensionless deflection of 0.7.

Keywords: Intelligent memory metal fin; Heat transfer enhancement; Natural convection; PCM; Melting and solidification process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:218:y:2023:i:c:s0960148123012818

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2023.119366

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