Experimental and numerical investigation on thermal performance enhancement of phase change material embedding porous metal structure with cubic cell

Phase change material (PCM) is a promising candidate for application to thermal energy storage. However, low thermal conductivity hinders its wide application. In this paper, a porous metal structure (PMS) with cubic cell is used to enhance the thermal performance of PCM, in which additive manufacturing (AM) as advanced manufacturing technology enables the fast and precise fabrication of PMS with a controlled structure and material. A visualized experiment setup is built to investigate the thermal performance of PCM with and without PMS, including solid-liquid interface, temperature variation, and total melting time. To examine the heat transfer characteristics and clarify the role of PMS in the melting process, a three-dimensional numerical model is developed based on the pore-scale numerical simulation method. The experimental results illustrate that embedding PMS can significantly improve the thermal performance of PCM, e.g., the total melting time can be shortened by 38% compared with that for PCM without PMS. The numerical results are in good agreement with experimental results, which indicates that heat transfer characteristics can be predicted using pore-scale numerical simulation. The numerical results show that the temperature field of PCM with PMS is more uniform and heat transfer mechanics is different for PCM with and without PMS. In addition, PMS made of highly thermally conducive materials significantly enhances the thermal performance of PCM. Due to structure and material controllability of porous material fabricated by AM, this study highlights the capacity and potential of PMS as a heat transfer enhancer.