Solidification of nano-enhanced PCM-porous composites in a cylindrical cold thermal energy storage enclosure

Latent thermal energy storage units are extensively used for compensating for the misalignment of energy production and demand. Regardless of the extensive applications of these appliances in the industries, they suffer from the slow progress of phase change, which restricts their great potential. The efforts of the current research are concentrated on using the combination of several enhancement techniques, including the implementation of porous foams, fins, and nanomaterials for pushing the phase change rate of one of these systems towards the desirable speed. For this purpose, first, the influence of container orientation is studied. Then, the freezing process of four different nano-enhanced phase change material (PCM)-porous composites, with porous materials of aluminum, copper, nickel, and graphite is examined. After selecting copper foam as the su-perior composite for the unit, different foam porosities are tested. It was found that while occupying 3%vol of the container capacity with CuO nanomaterials creates only 24.3% of improvement, spending the same volume on copper foam accelerates the process by 84.6%. The evaluations also indicated that by using copper foam with a porosity of 0.95 and CuO nano -materials with a concentration of 0.03 at the same time, the phase change rate can be elevated by 92.5%.

Automated summary

Latent thermal energy storage units are widely used but suffer from slow phase change. Current research focuses on using enhancement techniques, such as porous foams, fins, and nanomaterials. Experimental results show that copper foam performs best in accelerating the phase change rate of the storage unit.