Icam Nantes has been working for few years to enhance the thermal efficiency of industrial processes by recovering the waste heat in Latent Heat Thermal Energy Storages (LHTES). Several prototypes have been designed and tested successfully for food industry. Today, Icam is working on a new design for automotive industry. A first prototype, based on packed bed storage principle has been tested in 2019. The objective of the 2020 work is to optimize this storage. In order to determine the new storage design, a numerical study has to be performed. The numerical simulation will be performed at the local scale for one capsule, then at the global scale for the full LHTES. The CFD tool Fluent, Blender and Scilab/Matlab will be used in this study.
First, the heat transfer between one PCM capsule and the flow will be investigated. The objective is to determine the thermal resistance between the PCM and the capsule and the influence of the flow direction on the heating/cooling time. This study will be done using a CFD code.
In a second step, a 3 liters tank storage will be modeled in order to calculate the performance of the storage. The CFD simulation could then be coupled to Matlab to minimize the computational cost. Different diameters of the storage tank could be investigated for a given number of capsules.
In the last stage, the system will be modeled using 1D transient calculation.
