Thermal performance investigation of finned latent heat storage of shell‐and‐tube, shell‐and‐nozzle, and shell‐and‐reducer models

Abstract

Three models of latent heat storage with circular fins were studied numerically and experimentally in this paper. The models were shell‐and‐tube, shell‐and‐nozzle, and shell‐and‐reducer. These models were investigated for two different inlets of heat transfer fluid (HTF), from the bottom and top of the models, so the number of studied cases was six. The results of the comparison between the cases showed that the different HTF inlet with a fixed mass flow rate greatly affects the completion time of the melting process; the bottom inlet of HTF accelerates the melting compared to the top inlet because it enhances the role of natural convection. Compared with shell‐and‐tube with bottom HTF inlet, the shell‐and‐nozzle with bottom inlet reduces the melting time by 11.2%, while the shell‐and‐reducer with bottom inlet delays the melting by 24%. The results of the top HTF inlet cases showed that shell‐and‐nozzle delays the melting by 16% compared with shell‐and‐tube, while the melting is not completed in shell‐and‐reducer. Shell‐and‐nozzle with a bottom HTF inlet shows the shortest melting time and the best thermal performance among all the other cases due to the geometric design of the model. On comparing the numerical and experimental results, good agreement was found between them.