Role of Heating Location on the Performance of a Natural Convection Driven Melting Process Inside a Square-Shaped Thermal Energy Storage System

Abstract

In this work, numerical experiments were performed to compare the heat transfer and thermodynamic performance of melting process inside the square-shaped thermal energy storage system with three different heating configurations: an isothermal heating from left side-wall or bottom-wall or top-wall and with three adiabatic walls. The hot wall is maintained at a temperature higher than the melting temperature of the phase change material (PCM), while all other walls are perfectly insulated. The transient numerical simulations were performed for melting Gallium (a low Prandtl number Pr = 0.0216, low Stefan number, Ste = 0.014, PCM with high latent heat to density ratio) at moderate Rayleigh number (Ra ≊ 105). The transient numerical simulations consist of solving coupled continuity, momentum, and energy equation in the unstructured formulation using the PISO algorithm. In this work, the fixed grid, a source-based enthalpy-porosity approach has been adopted. The heat transfer performance of the melting process was analyzed by studying the time evolution of global fluid fraction, Nusselt number at the hot wall, and volume-averaged normalized flow-kinetic-energy. The thermodynamic performance was analyzed by calculating the local volumetric entropy generation rates and absolute entropy generation considering both irreversibilities due to the finite temperature gradient and viscous dissipation. The bottom-heating configuration yielded the maximum Nusselt number but has a slightly higher total change in entropy generation compared to other heating configurations.