Latent heat storage

Phase Change Materials (PCMs) are materials that undergo a phase change in a desired temperature range, which will depend on the industrial process for which the utilization of the PCM is intended. In a phase change process, a relatively high amount of energy (latent) is delivered or absorbed. This phenomenon can be used to store energy, using less storage material than would be used with a sensible energy storage medium. The resulting storage device should be lighter and smaller than one whose storage capacity is only due to sensible energy changes. Usually, materials that melt/solidify at the desired temperature are considered as PCMs, due to the low density changes suffered at these phase changes. Some examples of potential applications of this kind of thermal storage are in concentrated solar power stations (CSP) and air conditioning (HVAC), although they can be adopted in virtually any application that can make profit of thermal storage.

CTTC has been working in the evaluation and design of thermal energy storage devices (TES) incorporating PCMs, for both low and high temperature applications. Numerical simulations of latent heat storage devices have been performed using both fast-global (for a global performance evaluation in a long time interval, e.g. days) and CFD models (detailed performance evaluation in a smaller time length, e.g. hours).

Fig. 1: Sketch representing the cylindrical container with the PCM capsules packed in a random fashion

Fig 2: Numerical simulation of n-Octadecane melting in a spherical capsule. Colors indicate temperature level, where red is the highest (liquid phase), while blue is the lowest temperature (solid phase).

References

P.A. Galione, C.D. Pérez-Segarra, I. Rodríguez, O. Lehmkuhl, J. Rigola. A new thermocline-PCM thermal storage concept for CSP plants. Numerical analysis and perspectives. SolarPaces 2013, Las Vegas, USA.
J. Castro, P. Galione, S. Morales, O. Lehmkuhl, J. Rigola, C.D. Pérez-Segarra, A. Oliva. Numerical modelling of the phase change material heat accumulator under fast transient gasification conditions in a low thrust cryogenic propulsion (ltcp) system. Space Propulsion 2012, Bordeaux, France.
P. Galione, J. Rigola, J. Castro, I. Rodríguez. Solid-liquid phase change with turbulent flow. Turbulence, Heat and Mass Transfer 7, Palermo, Italia, 2012.
P.A. Galione, O. Lehmkuhl, J. Rigola, A. Oliva, I. Rodríguez. Numerical simulations of energy storage with encapsulated phase change materials. Special emphasis on solid-liquid phase change CFD modelling. Innostock 2012 – The 12th International Conference on Energy Storage, Lleida, Spain.
P.A. Galione. Unstructured modelling of solid-liquid phase change using parallel computing. Application to the analysis of thermal energy storage systems with encapsulated phase change materials. MSc thesis, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, 2011.
Galione, P., Lehmkuhl, O., Rigola, Q., Oliva, A. and Rodríguez, I. Numerical simulations of thermal energy storage systems with phase change materials. ISES Solar World Congress 2011, Kassel, Germany, 2011.

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