Investigation of heat transfer inside a PCM-air heat exchanger: a numerical parametric study

In this paper, the use of PCMs for thermal storage of energy in HVAC applications was investigated by studying numerically the thermal performance of a PCM-air heat exchanger. The PCM used in this study was dodecanoic acid. A symmetric 3D model, incorporating conductive and convective heat transfer (air only) as well as laminar flow, was created in COMSOL Multiphysics 5.0. Simulations examined the dependence of the heat transfer rate on the temperature and velocity of the incoming air as well as the size of the channels in the heat exchanger. Results indicated that small channels size lead to a higher heat transfer rates. A similar trend was also obtained for high incoming air temperature, whereas the heat transfer rate was less sensitive to the incoming air velocity.