Study on the melting process of phase change materials in metal foams using lattice Boltzmann method

A thermal lattice Boltzmann model is developed for the melting process of phase change material (PCM) embedded in open-cell metal foams. Natural convection in the melt PCM is considered. Under the condition of local thermal non-equilibrium between the metal matrix and PCM, two evolution equations of temperature distribution function are presented through selecting an equilibrium distribution function and a nonlinear source term properly. The enthalpy-based method is employed to copy with phase change problem. Melting process in a cavity of the metal foams is simulated using the present model. The melting front locations and the temperature distributions in the metal foams filled with PCM are obtained by the lattice Boltzmann method. The effects of the porosity and pore size on the melting are also investigated and discussed. The results indicate that the effects of foam porosity play important roles in the overall heat transfer. For the lower porosity foams, the melting rate is comparatively greater than the higher porosity foams, due to greater heat conduction from metal foam with high heat conductivity. The foam pore size has a limited effect on the melting rate due to two counteracting effects between conduction and convection heat transfer.