Experimental study of coil and shell phase change material heat exchanger.

Abstract

Phase change material-based thermal energy storage (PCM-TES) is a promising thermal energy storage technology because of its high energy storage density and narrower working transition temperature. These devices store energy in the form of latent heat in a phase change material. For these devices, there are no previously established guidelines to determine the relationship between the heat transfer rate, and their physical and operational parameters. To develop such guidelines for different PCM-TES configurations, their performance data at different operating conditions are needed. In this work, different configurations of coil-and-shell type PCM-TES device are built and tested at different operating conditions. The obtained results are analyzed, and key parameters impacting the heat transfer process are identified. Also, an attempt is made to compare different experiments using melting Stefan number (Stem), total Stefan number (Stet), average heat transfer rate (Qavg) and normalized heat transfer rate (Qnorm).