Enhanced heat transfer in free convection-dominated melting in a rectangular cavity with an isothermal vertical wall

✍ Scribed by Zhen-Xiang Gong; Sakamon Devahastin; Arun S. Mujumdar

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 240 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1359-4311
• DOI: 10.1016/s1359-4311(99)00003-4

✦ Synopsis

Free convection-dominated melting of a phase change material in a rectangular cavity with an isothermally heated vertical wall is simulated using the streamline upwind/Petrov±Galerkin ®nite element technique in combination with a ®xed-grid primitive variable method. The enthalpy±porosity model is employed to account for the physics of the evolution of the ¯ow at the solid/liquid interface. A penalty formulation is used to treat the incompressibility constraint in the momentum equations. Inverting of the container at an appropriate stage during the melting process is proposed as a simple but eective technique for enhancement of free convection-controlled heat transfer in the phase change material. The technique results in more than 50% increase of the energy charge rate during the melting process for some speci®c cases.