Effect of copper foam fin (CFF) shapes on thermal performance improvement of the latent heat storage units

摘要

To overcome the poor thermal change of Phase Change Material (PCM), Copper Foam Fin (CFF) was innovatively utilized to enhance the PCM heat transfer capability and improve the thermal performance of vertical shell-and tube latent heat storage units (LHSUs). Three CFF shapes, including annular CFF (ACFF), longitudinal CFF (LCFF) and compound CFF (CCFF), were designed with the same filling ratio of 30. A contrastive experiment with three flow rates was conducted to evaluate the heat transfer capacity of LHSUs integrated with three CFF shapes. Experimental results showed the CFF shape had the large effects on the thermal performance of LHSU and that ACFF showed the most excellent thermal performance. Compared with LCFF and CCFF, adding ACFF could increase the melting rates by 14.1 and 3.9, the solidification rates by 10.1 and 2.7, and the thermal efficiency by 21.9 and 42.0, respectively. And ACFF and CCFF units showed better performance in the liquid interface distribution and the temperature uniformity. Moreover, the volume flow rate had the small influence on the temperature response rate, but could improve the thermal efficiency significantly.