High-Temperature Thermocline TES Combining Sensible and Latent Heat - CFD Modeling and Experimental Validation

The concept of combined sensible/latent heat thermal energy storage (TES) has been exploited to mitigate an intrinsic thermocline TES systems drawback of heat transfer fluid outflow temperature reduction during discharging. In this study, the combined sensible/latent TES prototype under investigation is constituted by a packed bed of rocks and a small amount of encapsulated phase change material (AlSi12) as sensible heat and latent heat sections respectively. The thermo-fluid dynamics behavior of the combined TES prototype was analyzed by means of a computational fluid dynamics approach. Due to the small value of the characteristic vessel-to-particles diameter ratio, the effect of radial void-fraction variation, also known as channeling, was accounted for. Both the sensible and the latent heat sections of the storage were modeled as porous media under the assumption of local thermal non-equilibrium (LTNE). The commercial code ANSYS Fluent 15.0 was used to solve the model's constitutive conservation and transport equations obtaining a fairly good agreement with reference experimental measurements.