Investigation of thermal-hydro dynamical behavior on nano-encapsulated PCM suspension: Effect of fin position, fractioning and aspect ratio

Phase change material considered as a novel energy transport material can be used for modern energy storages. Nowadays, the energy transport enhancement can be achieved using the extended heat transference surface. The present research is devoted to numerical simulation of thermal convection of nano-encapsulated phase change material within a square differentially-heated chamber under an influence of solid fins of different location, sizes and number. The governing equations of conjugate convective energy transport written using the nondimensional primitive variables have been worked out by the finite element technique. The developed computational code has been verified employing computational and experimental results of other authors. Impacts of number of solid fins (1 <= N-f <= 6), aspect ratio of fins (0.1 <= gamma(1) <= 2.5) and dimentionless melt temperature (0.1 <= T-f <= 0.9) have been studied. It has been found that the heat transference augmentation with the fins number can be found for Ra = 10(4), while for Ra = 10(5) a rise of the fins number reduces the mean Nusselt number.