Phase change materials (PCMs), especially salt hydrates possess high volumetric energy storage capacity in their transition temperature range. These materials are used in applications where it is necessary to store thermal energy due to temporary load shift between demand and availability. Thus, possible applications are HVAC, recovery of waste heat, and defense thermal management. Despite salt hydrates potential, the practical feasibility of latent heat storage with salt hydrates is limited due to low power rating, supercooling, phase segregation, and long-term stability. Its low power rating and long-term stability limits its application in most applications. This work experimentally validates the stability and thermal performance of a compact heat exchanger charged with salt hydrate during melting and freezing. The compact heat exchanger was designed with fins on both the heat transfer fluid (HTF) and salt hydrate PCM side. The thermal performance of the latent heat thermal energy storage system (LHTESS) was evaluated for various operating conditions. The results show that LHTESS could achieve an average heat transfer coefficient of 124 and 87 W/(m2 K) during melting and solidification, respectively. The stability of the system in suppressing supercooling was validated over 800 cycles with nucleating agent and active homogenous nucleation techniques. The supercooling was reduced to 3 °C with zinc hydroxyl nitrate as nucleating agent and less than 1 °C with the active homogenous nucleation technique. The LHTESS showed less than 6% degradation in energy storage capacity over 800 cycles.

Plate-fin heat exchangers are widely used in industries especially aerospace, cryogenics, food and chemical process industries where high heat flux surface area per unit volume is of prime importance. These heat exchangers consists of series of corrugated plates (herringbone or chevron), separated by gasket sealing. Chevron angled plates are one of the most commonly used type of geometry. The complex design of chevron plate heat exchanger, induces high turbulence and flow reversals causing high heat transfer through the plates. This paper discusses about the computational fluid dynamics simulations conducted over a simplified geometry of Chevron Plate Heat Exchanger to understand the formulation of vortices at different Reynold’s number for various aspect ratios. A single phase laminar flow with periodic boundary condition is used for analysis of the fluid behavior in a unit pattern of the corrugation geometry. Based on different flow and geometric conditions, varying amounts of swirl-flows are observed and different behavior of shear stress and heat transfer plot along the length of the plate is observed. At higher Reynolds numbers (Re), the re-circulations and mixing by the induced vortices causes significant rise of heat flux, with marginal increase in friction factor.