Numerical simulation of heat storage for domestic applications

Abstract

The aim of this work is to perform a high-level numerical simulation platform for heat storage systems with or without phase change materials (PCM). The simulation allows to predict the thermal behavior of the aforementioned systems and to carry out parametric studies in order to find the most appropriate geometry and materials for different operating conditions. The studied storage system here presented is composed by a cylindrical tank and a pipe tube inside the tank. The proposed methodology is based on the numerical simulation of the storage system by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics & Heat Transfer (CFD&HT) software, called TermoFluids, which is used in this work for solving the heat transfer in the fluid flow inside tank. In the case of fluid flow inside pipe, it is solved considering a quasi-homogenous fully-implicit one-dimensional (1D) model, where the governing equations are discretized along the whole tube domain.