Thermal performances of non-equidistant helical-coil phase change accumulator for latent heat storage

Helical-coil is a common structure of heat exchanger unit in phase change heat accumulator and usually has the equal coil pitch between adjacent coils. Its thermal performances could be improved by improving the uniformity of the phase change material (PCM) temperature distribution. Thus, a novel non-equidistant helical-coil structure was proposed in this study. Its coil pitch decreased along the flow direction of heat transfer fluid, which made the heat exchange area in unit volume increase to match the decreasing temperature difference between the heat transfer fluid and PCM. The structure was optimized using numerical simulation. An experimental system was developed and the experiment results indicated that the proposed non-equidistant helical-coil heat accumulator was more effective than equidistant helical-coil for latent heat storage. The uniformity of the temperature distribution was also confirmed by simulation results.