Experimental and numerical study on the thermal behavior of phase change material infiltrated in low porosity metal foam

• Published in: Journal of energy storage 2019-12, Vol.26, p.101005, Article 101005
• Main Authors: Hu, Xusheng, Zhu, Feng, Gong, Xiaolu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Low porosity metal foam; Mechanics; Mechanics of materials; Modified Kelvin model; Numerical simulation; Phase change material; Physics; Thermal behavior
• ISSN: 2352-152X; 2352-1538
• DOI: 10.1016/j.est.2019.101005

•Experimental and numerical investigation of the thermal behavior for PCM infiltrated in LPMF is conducted.•Modified Kelvin model of composite PCM is developed and validated with the experiment.•The geometrical parameter of metal foam has effects on the thermal behavior of composite PCM.•The effective thermal conductivity of composite PCM is evaluated using pore-scale numerical simulation. In this paper, a comprehensive experimental and numerical investigation is conducted to study the thermal behavior of phase change material (PCM) infiltrated in low porosity metal foam (LPMF). A visible experiment is designed to trace the temperature field and solid-liquid melting evolvement of PCM with and without metal foam. The experimental method and pore-scale numerical simulation are employed to extract temperature histories at different location during the melting process. Besides, the effective thermal conductivity of composite PCM is calculated by numerical simulation and compared with the theoretical models. Experimental results indicate that the thermal behavior of PCM can be visibly enhanced by embedding LPMF, e.g., by comparing with pure paraffin, the melting time of composite PCM is reduced by 45% and the maximum temperature difference is decreased by 83.3%. The porosity has influences on the thermal characteristics of composite PCMs. Numerical results exhibit good agreement with experimental data, which indicates that modified Kelvin model can be employed to predict the thermal performance of composite PCM. Also it can be found from numerical results that effective thermal conductivities of composite PCMs are distinctly heightened, e.g., the effective thermal conductivities of composite PCM with 67% porosity is about 108 times as much as that of paraffin. Numerical model is of great significance for study and design of thermal management system using composite PCM.