Packed Bed Latent Heat Storage

Application ID: 76181


Thermal energy storage units are used to accumulate thermal energy from solar, geothermal, or waste heat sources. The simplest units are built from water tanks, often found in households, where the solar energy is stored as sensible heat. The thermal capacity of these tanks can be further increased by including latent heat, which gives rise to latent heat storage (LHS) units. Typically, LHS tanks contain spherical capsules filled with paraffin as phase change material. This example models the flow through a packed-bed storage tank, and it includes the effects of heat transfer with phase change and local thermal nonequilibrium while charging the LHS unit.

This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products: