Conjugate Heat Transfer in Latent Heat Thermal Storage System With Cross Plate Fins

Abstract

Latent heat thermal storage systems (LHTS) utilize their latent heat capacity to dissipate high heat fluxes while maintaining quasi-isothermal conditions. Phase change materials (PCMs) absorb a large amount of energy during their phase transformation from solid to liquid, maintaining quasi-isothermal conditions. However, they are often beset with low thermal conductivities which necessitate the use of a thermal conductivity enhancer (TCE) as it is impossible to design a device that can completely avoid sensible heat in the premelting or postmelting phase. In this study, the heat transfer performance of LHTS with cross plate fins as a TCE is numerically investigated for different values of fin thicknesses and fin numbers along the length and breadth. A hybrid artificial neural network coupled genetic algorithm (ANN–GA) is then used to obtain the optimized dimensions for the composite heat sink with cross plate fins as TCE for a fixed volume and a specific heat flux input. The numerically optimized configuration is finally validated with in-house experiments.