Effect of tubes added to heat exchanger: Heat transfer and energy storage improvement on phase change material

Due to the low thermal conductivity of Phase Change Materials (PCM), the performances of the Heat transfer of Latent Thermal Energy Storage systems is generally unsatisfactory. In this work, a numerical study is carried out after studying the effect of the number of tubes added to a heat exchanger in order to enhance the heat transfer in PCM materials, keeping the same mass of internal tubes and the same quantity of the PCM during the process. The modelling of the phase change has been carried out implementation of apparent thermal capacity in the commercial CFD software COMSOL Multiphysics, which is based on solving Partial Differential Equations (EDP) by the Finite Element Method (FEM). The evolution of the fraction of melting as a function of time is examined, which will give us the percentage of the melted PCM at different instances. The results showed that the time of melting decreases with respect to the increase of the number of tubes added. This work leads us to know the usefulness of the numerical modelling and simulation techniques as means to make the proper and convenient decision.