Melting of a phase change material assisted by a thermosyphon inside a two dimensional rectangular domain is numerically investigated. The PCM used is n-eicosane and the thermosyphon is made of copper. The working fluid is water. The fill ratio of the working fluid (water) is taken to be 50%. A lumped model is used for the simulation of transient operation of the thermosyphon and enthalpy-porosity method is employed for numerical simulation of melting of PCM. The effects of inclusion of multiple heat pipes on the melting of the PCM inside the enclosure is studied. Simulation results indicate that the addition of heat pipes enhances the performance of latent heat thermal energy storage system only upto a certain extent. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.

C. Balaji

Department of Mechanical Engineering

R. Srikanth

Rohits S. Nair

Capillary flow

Enclosures

FLUIDS

Heat Pipes

Heat storage

Numerical methods

Phase change materials

Siphons

THERMOSYPHONS

Enthalpy-porosity method

LATENT HEAT THERMAL ENERGY STORAGE SYSTEMS

LUMPED MODELING

Numerical approaches

Rectangular enclosures

Transient operation

TWO-DIMENSIONAL RECTANGULAR

Working fluid

Melting

Fulltext

IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

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IIT Madras

Thermosyphon assisted melting of PCM inside a rectangular enclosure:A synergistic numerical approach

Journal of Physics: Conference Series

This paper reports the results of a numerical optimization and experimental investigation of phase change material (PCM) based composite pin fin matrix heat sink. The main objective of this study is to determine the optimized configuration of the matrix type heat sink that will stretch the operation time during the heating cycle and minimize the time during the discharging cycle. The PCM used is n-eicosane. The heat sink is made of aluminium. A constant heat flux of 1.9kW/m2 is applied at the bottom of the heat sink. The numerical results were matched up with the experimental results to determine the overall heat transfer coefficient with the help of commercially available ANSYS FLUENT 14.0 software. For constant power level and constant volume of the PCM, 40 different geometrical configurations of heat sinks were considered and temperature time histories were obtained for both the charging and discharging cycles by using full three dimensional simulations of flow and conjugate heat transfer including phase change using FLUENT 14.0. The output of these simulations was given as an input to a neural network and a multi objective optimization was carried out to determine the optimum configuration of the heat sink, that maximizes the charging period and minimizes the discharging period simultaneously. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd.

Applied Energy

Multi-objective geometric optimization of a PCM based matrix type composite heat sink

Energy Conversion and Management

Numerical study of finned heat pipe-assisted thermal energy storage system with high temperature phase change material

Convection Heat Transfer

International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer

Enhancement of latent heat energy storage using embedded heat pipes

Journal	Journal of Physics: Conference Series
Publisher	Institute of Physics Publishing
ISSN	17426588
Open Access	Yes