Jibin M Joy
School of Mechanical Sciences, IIT Bhubaneswar, Bhubaneswar-752050, India
Amman Jakhar
School of Mechanical Sciences, IIT Bhubaneswar, Bhubaneswar-752050, India; GL Solutions, Delhi-110041, India
Jegatheesan M
School of Mechanical Sciences, IIT Bhubaneswar, Bhubaneswar-752050, India
Prasenjit Rath
School of Mechanical Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar, Odisha-752050, India
Anirban Bhattacharya
Measurement and Process Analysis Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Bihta-801103, Bihar, India; School of Mechanical Sciences, IIT Bhubaneswar, Argul, Jatni, Odisha-752050, India
The study of phase change material-metal foam composites (PCM-M) has received a lot of attention in the past few years given its good energy storage density and high effective thermal conductivity. With a large surface area to volume ratio of the metallic structure owing to a system of overlapping pores, the PCM-M composites have significantly higher heat transfer rates for a given amount of metal as compared to fin-based structures. Significant effort has gone into modelling the behavior of PCM-M. A majority of the efforts have been through volume averaging method, but with the improvement of computational resources, concrete efforts have been made to accurately map the geometry of the pores at a pore-scale level. By capturing the geometry of the foam, accurate analysis of the heat transfer and temperature variations can be done. In the present study, a novel geometry creation model is used which utilizes the random sphere generation method. The study then aims to create a numerical model that solves the melting of PCM by enthalpy method and captures the effect of natural convection through the development of an in-house program. It seeks to quantify the effect of buoyancy driven natural convection during the melting process by comparing the convection based results with cases where the only mode of heat transfer is conduction. It is observed that the metal foam geometry greatly affects the melting behavior of the composite system and hence careful perusal must be done while designing similar systems in order to obtain maximum melting efficacy.