| The development of renewable energy is the key to the continuous development of society.However,the intermittency and the inconsistency of the renewable energy source has largely limited its use and application.The energy storage technology can be regarded as one of the solutions to the intermittent characteristic of renewable energy by storing the inconsistent energy output and output the stored energy in a stable way while needed.Among all the energy storage methods,the latent heat storage(LHS)is known for its high energy density,stable working temperature and safety.Hence,it is considered one of the most promising energy storage technologies with a stable and balanced overall performance.Although the LHS has proved its advantages in energy density,the low heat storage efficiency caused by its poor thermal conductivity has limited its use in real industry.Hence,the heat transfer enhancement of LHS needs investigating.For increasing its heat transfer rate,except for improving the thermal conductivity of the PCM,use of the finned heat sink embedded in the LHS unit is also widely investigated.The finned heat sink can transfer the heat in a thorough and balanced way to increase the thermal storage efficiency.In this paper,the topology optimization of the LHS has been investigated in both numerical and experimental way.Here below are some of the main results of the paper;(1)A comparison has been carried out between the optimized finned heat sink and other common heat sinks to prove the advantage of the optimized fin structure in heat transfer.(2)Natural convection has been taken into account and its influence on the optimization result has been analyzed in the paper.(3)The reconstruction of the optimized finned structure has been carried out to make it possible to fabricate the heat sink and prepare for the upcoming experimental validation.(4)The experimental bench has been designed and built to validate the heat transfer ability of the optimized finned structure. |
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