Energy Engineering and Management

Energy Engineering and Management

Numerical study of the effect of multiple phase change materials on improving the performance of a thermal storage system in the presence of a middle plate

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
Aghil Iranmanesh 1
Ali Ghorbani 2
Hadi Farzan 3
1 University of Jiroft, Jiroft, Iran
2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Jiroft
3 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan
10.22052/eem.2026.258903.1180
Abstract
In the present study, the numerical simulation of the melting process of a vertical triple-tube heat exchanger in the presence of multiple phase change materials and a middle plate is studied. The numerical simulation is modeled in ANSYS Fluent software using the enthalpy-porosity method. The temperature of the hot fluid passing through the heat exchanger is assumed to be 50 °C while the initial temperature of the heat exchanger is set to 15 °C. The hot fluid passing through the heat storage system flows through the inner and outer tubes in a counter-current manner. The flow regime is supposed to be laminar. To assess the effect of multiple phase change materials and the middle plate on improving the thermal efficiency of the energy storage system, the contours of liquid fraction and PCM temperature are compared in different cases. According to the reported numerical results, the simultaneous use of multiple phase change materials (phase change material with lower melting temperature in the inner chamber and phase change materials with higher melting temperature in the outer chamber) as well as the upper, lower and middle plates will increase the thermal energy stored in the heat exchanger by 158.41%.
Keywords
Convection heat transfer
Thermal energy storage
Middle plate
Multiple phase change material
Melting process
Subjects