Development of a Computationally Efficient Method for Modelling Thermal Energy Storage in Packed Beds of Spherically Encapsulated Phase Change Material
Abstract
A novel computationally efficient method for modelling melting and solidification processes in packed beds of PCM encapsulated spheres is introduced. The proposed method involves the full discretization of only one centrally located sphere to fully simulate the phase change process, while treating all other spheres in the packed bed as voids with boundary conditions derived from the simulated sphere. At each time step, the computed heat transfer parameters on the exterior surface of the simulated sphere undergoing the phase change process are extracted, and imposed as boundary conditions on surrounding spheres. The proposed method results in a significant reduction in computational resources that otherwise are required to simulate phase change in all spheres in the packed bed, while accurately simulating the thermal exchange between the packed bed elements and heat transfer fluid. Sample results are presented to demonstrate the proposed method.