Experimental Transient Performance of Heat Sink with Phase Change Material and Movable Metal Foams Insert

Abstract

The effects of embedding fixed and movable metal foams in composite PCMs on the transient performance were studied with pulsed heat loads experimentally under various powers and different cell sizes. Similar conclusions could be drawn both from the experimental and numerical results. It was shown that when fixed metal foams were solely adopted, the heat storage system performance could be enhanced by ∼24.6% by increasing the number of metal foams by three times at the heat flux of 56.1 W/cm2 and 15 ppi. When the movable technique was utilized, the heat transfer enhancement reached up to 36.9% under the same amount of metal foams for the same cell sizes and heat flux. The better performances were attributed to combined positive influences due to the adoption of the movable metal foam technique, which extends heat transfer area, improves heat conduction, and eases suppression of natural heat convection by cutting the amount of metal foams. Moreover, as cutting the amount of metal foams could obviously reduce the wastage of energy storage capacity, the movable metal foam technique demonstrated quite a promising future.