Study of the performance of phase change materials under dynamic conditions

As renewable energy sources spread across industrial, transport and domestic sectors, decoupling supply and demand becomes a crucial issue and energy storage is call to play a fundamental role. In this framework, the latent thermal energy storage (LTES) technology exploiting phase change materials (PCMs) represents an interesting option, as this class of materials is able to store large quantity of thermal energy. However, the most common materials used in LTES applications show a low thermal conductivity and this causes the conventional storage units to be characterized by low energy and power density. This thesis work aims at analyzing a novel configuration for the enhancement of the performance of a LTES device, called dynamic PCM (dynPCM). In particular, by means of the commercial multiphysics software COMSOL, a numerical model based on the enthalpy porosity method is developed to simulate phase change phenomena and subsequently it is validated. The model is then used to predict the performance of several different PCMs in the dynamic configuration. The output of the simulations is then compared to experimental results.