Experimental Investigation on Melting of Paraffin in Latent Thermal Energy Storage

This paper presents an experimental research of melting of paraffin inside a latent thermal energy storage. Experimental setup consists of a water-water heat pump, hot and cold water tanks and latent storage tank. Latent heat storage is a shell-and-tube type tank, consisting of 19 concentric tubes with eight equidistant longitudinal fins. A set of 30 thermocouples has been placed at various positions longitudinally and radially throughout the paraffin-side of the storage to monitor the timewise temperature changes during melting, while additional two thermocouples have been placed at water inlet and outlet positions. Data acquisition system, linked with a personal computer, was used for acquiring, processing and storing measured data. Experimental research has been performed in the Laboratory for thermal measurements at University of Rijeka, Faculty of Engineering. A set of experiments, with different water inlet temperatures, has been performed. Transient temperature changes of phase-change material (PCM) for different water inlet temperatures, and the amount of stored thermal energy have been analyzed and compared.