Transient Simulation of Heat Exchangers with Phase Change Material Mahle

Format:

Book

Conference/Event

Author/Creator:

Xia, Yanping, author.

Contributor:

Craig, Timothy

Wolfe, Edward

Conference Name:

WCX SAE World Congress Experience (2020-04-21 : Detroit, Michigan, United States)

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource cm

Place of Publication:

Warrendale, PA SAE International 2020

Summary:

Heat exchangers with Phase Change Material (PCM) are finding more energy storage applications for both ICEs and EVs. These applications include cold storage evaporators for stop-start cars, thermal storage system for EV cabin heating and cooling, and other HVAC and PTC peak load shaving applications. The energy stored in PCM heat exchangers is typically charged/discharged using refrigerant or coolant, depending on the system design of different applications. Due to the low thermal conductivity of state-of-art PCM, the PCM heat exchangers generally rely on aluminum fins to enhance the speed of charging and discharging of the stored energy. Different fin shape, height, and fin density will result in different PCM freezing/melting rate. In this paper, two different fin designs (folded-sine-wave fin and off-set-strip fin) are simulated with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to compare the melting time of a hot PCM with respect to different operating parameters (coolant temperature, coolant convection heat transfer coefficient, and PCM initial temperature). Next, a 1-D approximation of the 2-D transient heat conduction problem is proposed. The equivalent thermal conductivity of the 1-D approximation is determined using similar CFD approach to match the melting time of the original 2-D problem. The equivalent thermal conductivity of the 1-D approximation can be used as a single metric to evaluate different fin designs. Finally, a Simulink model is developed to simulate the transient performance of a full PCM heat exchanger using the 1-D equivalent thermal conductivity, which can be incorporated into system simulation to optimize the heat exchanger design and estimate in-vehicle performance. The model is validated against test data of a heat storage PCM heat exchanger, and potential peak load shaving application is demonstrated with simulation data

Notes:

Vendor supplied data

Publisher Number:

2020-01-0156

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license