Volume 25: Accelerated Energy Innovations and Emerging Technologies

A Study on the Effect of Metal Foam Tube’s Bottom Cross-Cut on Heat Transfer Performance Rukun Hu, Yuanji Li, Xiaohu Yang, Yaling He

Abstract

Metal foam has excellent characteristics to improve the performance of heat transfer in the latent thermal energy storage. However, as for horizontal heat storage tube, the refractory problem at the bottom leads to reduce heat storage efficiency. In this Manuscript, we cut off the bottom of horizontal tubes with different ratios to explore the influence on heat storage efficiency. Through the method of experiment and numerical simulation comparison, the melting fraction, melting interface and velocity field are obtained. The results showed that the smaller the bottom cross-cut ratio, the faster the melting rate. When the bottom cross-cut ratio is 0.6, the complete melting time is the least, 1120 s, which is 18.841 % shorter than that of the round tube.

Keywords metal foam, heat transfer, bottom, numerical simulation