Thermal Analysis of Solid/Liquid Phase Change in a Cavity with One Wall at Periodic Temperature

In this study, heat transfer in a square cavity filled with a Phase Change Material (PCM) under a sinusoidal wall temperature during solidification and melting is analyzed. All surfaces of the cavity are insulated except one surface, which is under the sinusoidal temperature change. The governing equations and boundary conditions are made dimensionless to reduce the number of governing parameters into two as dimensionless frequency and Stefan number. The governing equations were solved numerically by using Finite Volume Method for a wide range of Stefan number (0.1 < Ste < 1.0) and dimensionless frequency (0.23 < omega* < 2.04). Based on the obtained results, a chart in terms of Stefan number and dimensionless frequency is obtained to divide the heat transfer process in the cavity into three regions as uncompleted, completed, and overheated phase-change processes. For the uncompleted process, some parts of the cavity are inactive, and no phase change occurs in those parts of the cavity during the melting and freezing process. For the overheated phase change, the temperature of the cavity highly increases (or decreases), causing the sensible heat storage to compete with latent thermal storage. In the completed process, almost all thermal storage is done by the utilization of latent heat. The suggested graph helps thermal designers to avoid wrong designs and predict the type of thermal storage (sensible or latent) in the cavity without doing any computations.

Automated summary

The study analyzed heat transfer in a square cavity filled with a Phase Change Material (PCM) under sinusoidal wall temperature, identifying three regions of heat transfer processes and providing thermal designers with assistance in predicting thermal storage types in the cavity.