查看文章

A numerical investigation was carried out to evaluate the melting characteristics of phase change material (PCM) in an inner fin type rectangular encapsulation using different fin shape configurations. Despite straight fins are the commonly used in PCM thermal storage for heat transfer enhancement mechanism, increasing the number of fins can significantly hamper the natural convection effects which will only lead to a marginal improvement in heat transfer rate. Hence, exploring different geometrical fin shapes can be another option to improve heat transfer rate or served as an alternative method for thermal enhancement in latent heat storage system. This paper presents extensive computational simulation on the PCM melting in four different investigated fin shapes: straight fin, T-shape fin, Y-shape fin and cross-shape fin configurations. Fluent 6.3 simulation software was utilized in producing two-dimensional simulation to visualize the PCM melting fractions, temperature distributions and flow fields of the melting process internally. The results had shown that changing the geometrical fin shape was able to deliver comparable melting performance as the conventional straight fin configuration. The natural convection current formations and circulation patterns will be discussed in this paper.