| Summary: | Latent heat thermal energy storage (TES) plays an important role in the advocation of TES in contrast to sensible energy storage because of the large storage energy densities per unit mass/volume possible at a nearly constant thermal energy. In the current study, a heat exchange device with a zigzag configuration containing multiple phase-change-materials (m-PCMs) was considered, and an experimental system was built to validate the model for a single PCM. A two-dimensional numerical model was developed using the ANSYS Fluent 14.0 software program. The energy fractions method was put forward to calculate the average Ste number and the influence of Re and Ste numbers on the discharge process were studied. The influence of phase change temperature among m-PCMs on the solidification process has also been studied. A new boundary condition was defined to determine the combined effect of the Re and Ste numbers on the discharging process. The modelling results show that for a given input power, the Ste (or Re) number has a significant impact on the discharging process; however, the period value of inlet velocity has almost no impact on it. Besides, the zigzag plate with m-PCMs has a good impact on the temperature shock as “filter action” in the discharging process.
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