부산대학교 도서관

Tremendous attention has been paid to developing high-performance thermal energy storage (TES) unit with phase change materials (PCMs) for efficient utilization and stable supply of renewable energy. In this work, petal-shaped fin is proposed for enhancing PCM discharging performance in a horizontal TES unit. The numerical model was first built and its validity was verified by experimental results. Sixteen different fin structures with different rectangular part offsets, volume fractions and volume ratios of the annular part to the rectangular part of petal-shaped fin were then established. Their enhancement performances on PCM solidification were examined by the numerical model. Results show that the petal-shaped fin can lead to more uniform heat transfer and solidification compared to annular or rectangular fins. The rectangular part with an offset of 0.458 is the optimum, which shortens the solidification time by 23.6 % compared to the one with no offset. With this offset, the case more rectangular part of petal-shaped fin can further enhance the heat transfer compared to that with more annular part. The optimum volume ratio of the annular part to the rectangular part is 2.0, which reduces the solidification time by 4.1 % and 22.8 % respectively compared to the cases with traditional annular fins and longitudinal fins only at the same fin volume.