Numerical Study Model for Solidification and Melting of Nano-enhanced Phase Change Material by Enthalpy Porosity Method

Abstract

This paper presents numerical work on solidification and melting of nano-enhanced phase change material. In this work, we propose an improvised numerical solution for solidification and melting of nano-enhanced phase change material (NEPCM) by allowing different thermophysical properties in solid and liquid phase in enthalpyporosity method. The solidification and melting of NEPCM will be conducted in a twodimensional computational domain with adiabatic horizontal walls and isothermal vertical walls. In this approach, a single-domain formulation is coupled with porosity source term to the momentum equations to differentiate liquid and solid regions during the phase change process. A source term is also added to the energy equation via enthalpy terms to account for latent heat evolution during the same process. This research is expected to produce results closer to the experimental results relative to previous numerical works. This will indicate that the proposed model has contributed to the improvement on existing NEPCM solidification and melting numerical model.