Journal
APPLIED ENERGY
Volume 254, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2019.113507
Keywords
Phase change material; Supergravity effect; Copper foam; Pore-scale lattice Boltzmann method
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Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [51806203]
- Foundation for Innovative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China [51721004]
- Programme of Introducing Talents of Discipline to Universities Project [B16038]
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Latent heat thermal energy storage with metal foams has been considered as a promising candidate for thermal management in aerospace systems. Thus, there is good cause to deeply explore the heat transfer mechanisms of phase change material (PCM) melting with metal foams. In order to get close to the real situation, a three-dimensional, pore-scale lattice Boltzmann model is explored based on a three-dimensional reconstructed porous structure morphology taken from experimentally observed in this paper, to characterize the distribution of flow and temperature fields during charging of porous PCM. The gravity effects on heat transfer performance are documented by comparison of charging at different accelerates. During the charging process, nonuniform temperature distributions and inclined melting interfaces are presented at the latter stages, caused by the interplay of primary natural convection in the melting direction and secondary convection in the transverse direction. More inclined melting interfaces are observed as gravitational acceleration increases, yielding faster PCM melting in the upper region while melting in the bottom region almost terminated. This implies that natural convection gradually dominates heat transfer and leads to the temperature nonuniformity. Similar shape characteristics of melting interface are observed in two-dimensional model, while there is an apparent difference of the melting fraction, showing it gradually growing from 4.1% to 8.6% with increasing gravitational acceleration. These results indicate that secondary convection effect neglected in the two-dimensional model, leading to a significant error in the prediction of heat transfer performance.
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