Experimental study of the performance of a novel latent heat charging unit on charging and discharging processes

An experimental study is carried out to analyze the performance of a novel latent heat thermal energy storage (LHTES) unit on charging and discharging processes. A finned tube air heat exchanger is filled with phase change material PCM and enclosed in an insulated storage unit. The heart of our heat exchanger is made up from a U tubes filled with paraffin wax and interconnected by flat fins to increase the heat exchange surface. The effect of power supply, air mass flow rate and using the flat fins on the thermals behavior and effectiveness were studied. The experiments showed that the fins can accelerates the time of the start and the end of fusion by about 55 and 72%, respectively. The charging phase can be prolonged to 94% by increasing the power supply by 32%, which also allowed them to store and recover more than 5 times of thermal energy. The results show that for a fixed power, the reduction of the flow of 54% accelerates the charging phase, increase the maximum temperature up to 18.3% and extend the discharging phase.