Experimental Study Of Heat Transfer Enhancement Of Latent Heat Thermal Energy Storage

With the development of economy and society, energy crisis and environment pollution have already become two major problems faced to us. So developing and utilizing renewable energy and industrial waste heat have very important realistic meanings to energy conservation and environment protection. Latent heat thermal energy storage (LHTES), can storage energy by change the phases of phase change materials(PCMs), which can be used to solve the nonconformity problem on supply and demand time of solar energy and industry waste heat. At the same time, it can be uesed in shifting the peak heating and cooling loads off-peak hours. As a result, LHTES, as a new technology, has been noticed by academic and industrial teams for a long time. When the PCM is designated, under the certain operating situations, the most prominent question is that the thermal conductivity of most PCMs, especially organic PCMs, is too poor. So, how to enhance the heat transfer of LHTES, is gradually becoming a new focuses.Thus, research in this area captivated the interest of a number of researchers.Based on the existing theoretical and experimental studies, how to enhance the heat transfer of LHTES was studied in this paper. At first, an introduction of the application of heat storage and latent heat storage was given. Then different ways of latent heat storage were presented and compared with each other, and it was proposed that solid-liquid latent heat storage had widespread application prospect. And through the comprehensive comparisions, along with the DSC analysis of different PCMs, it was determined to select the stearic acid(C18H36O2)as the PCM in this paper, provided by Beijing chemical reagent company. The stearic acid has an ideal melting point and attractive thermal capacity. All these properties make it an attractive candidate as a potential PCM for heat storage in mid-temperature LHTES systems.And then, on the foundation of comparing of different ways of enhancing of latent heat transfer, the way of adding fins in the LHTES was selected, and it was taken as the main research object in this paper. As a result, three different fins were designed to enhance the latent heat transfer, including circular fins, vertical fins and screw fins. After the PCM and the way of enhancement of latent heat tansfer were selected, an experiment device was designed and introduced. The experiment device is comprised of LHTES system and three assistant systems. Thereinto, LHTES system is a hollow...