Experimental Study on the Effect of Using Metallic Brushes on the Charging and Discharging Time of Thermal Energy Storage Unit

Abstract

Phase change materials are known to be good in use in latent heat thermal energy storage (LHTES) systems, but one of their drawbacks is the slow melting and solidification processes. So that, in this work, enhancing heat transfer of phase change material is studied experimentally for in charging and discharging processes by the addition of high thermal conductive material such as copper in the form of brushes, which were added in both PCM and air sides. The additions of brushes have been carried out with different void fractions (97%, 94% and 90%) and the effect of four different air velocities was tested. The results indicate that the minimum brush void fraction gave the maximum heat transfer in PCM and reduced the time for melting for (ϵ=90%) up to 4.49 times as compare with the case of no brush. It can be seen that the addition of brushes in air side helped to reduce the solidification time and increase the convection heat transfer coefficient as the brush void fraction decreased. Also the minimum velocity (v = 1 m/s) gave maximum outlet temperature.