Study Of Simplified Heat-Transfer Model Of Phase Change Material Plate

With the development of economy,the energy shortage has became a problem that must be faced.Recently,the energy storage has attracted increasing attention,because it can save energy,shift load from peak to off-peak,and it is beneficial to economy and environment.Phase change materials(PCM)are widely used in energy storage technology.Efficient and accurate simulation methods are required in energy storage technology.It is necessary to develop an efficient and accurate heat-transfer PCM model.Therefore,a PCM plate is analyzed in this paper.Due to the heat transfer analysis of plate,a simplified analytical model is proposed in this paper.The heat transfer process can be described by a RC circuit concept with variable resistance and capacitor.In this model,the nodes are located at each interface between every two phases and wall,the length of solid,mushy,and liquid phase determine the value of thermal resistance and heat capacity in each period of time.Because of the heat-transfer,the lengths of phases are constantly changing,then the location of nodes,thermal resistance and heat capacity are also changed.According to the different phase-change state,the solution equation can be switched in order to simulate the heat-transfer process of PCM completely.A computational fluid dynamics(CFD)model is used to evaluate the performance of simplified RC model.The results show that simplified RC model can solve the heat-transfer process of PCM satisfactory while saving the computational cost.Consequently,based on the simplified model,the thermal characteristics of PCM plate with different thermosphysical parameters are compared.