Journal
APPLIED ENERGY
Volume 179, Issue -, Pages 237-246Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2016.06.138
Keywords
Latent heat storage; PCM; Polymer; Experimental storage characterization; CFD simulation
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Funding
- Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) (StorelTup I) [838669]
- Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) (StorelTup-IF) [848914]
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Polymers have rarely been used as storage materials in latent heat storages up to now. Thus, we systematically screened all polymers available on a large-scale, selected promising ones based on their theoretical properties and experimentally tested more than 50 candidates. We found that polyethylene, polyoxymethylene and polyamides are promising even as recycled material. Especially high density polyethylene (HDPE) turned out to be suitable as was shown by detailed thermophysical characterization including more than 1000 heating and cooling cycles for INEOS Rigidex HD6070EA. We built a storage with 170 kg HDPE and a total mass of 600 kg based on a fin-tube heat exchanger and characterized its energy capacity, power characteristics and temperature profiles using a thermal oil test rig. A 3-dimensional model was implemented in ANSYS Fluent achieving excellent agreement between experiment and simulation. By analyzing the internal heat transfer contributions, temperature distributions and flow conditions, we were able to propose an optimized design and operation for future polymer latent heat storages. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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