Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
JOURNAL OF POLYTECHNIC-POLITEKNIK DERGISI, 2024 (ESCI)
During the design of thermal management systems involving Phase Change Materials (PCM), analysis tools are essential for determining the amount of PCM required, optimal instalment locations, and the heating-cooling transient behavior of the systems. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solvers are often employed for these tasks. However, CFD simulations can be computationally expensive, when solving transient problems. An alternative approach for PCM simulations is the Finite Element Method (FEM), which offers computationally inexpensive heat transfer analyses while providing good accuracy for thermal energy storage design. This study has focused on thermal analysis of paraffin performed by FEM. During the studies, thermal properties of the paraffin which was obtained by differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) analysis was adopted to the FEM model and transient analyses were performed. The results showed that the finite element results are in good agreement with the experimental data which was acquired from middle and top measurement points and less than 10% error margin was obtained. However, large discrepancies of up to 22% between the experiment and the analyses were observed. This large error margin indicated that FEM was not capable of capturing fast phase transformations. In addition to the numerical results obtained from the experiment and analyses, it was noted that the solution time was less than an hour for each case.