Selvan Bellan

Loop thermosiphon thermal collector for waste heat recovery power generation

ABSTRACT A loop thermosiphon thermal collector was developed for the waste heat recovery power generation with electric capacity of 500 W. The heat collector with heat transfer area of 0.159 m2 (500 mm width and 300 mm depth) was connected to the condenser with a shrunken heat transfer area by a loop. The thermal performance of the apparatus was declined when increasing the water filling rate to 90% as the working fluid occupied the internal volume. In the range of water filling rate between 30% and 60%, the effective thermal conductivity was around100 times of the conductivity of copper.

Numerical analysis of fluid flow and heat transfer during melting inside a cylindrical container for thermal energy storage system

This paper presents a numerical analysis of unconstrained melting of high temperature(>1000K) phase change material (PCM) inside a cylindrical container. Sodium chloride and Silicon carbide have been used as phase change material and shell of the capsule respectively. The control volume discretization approach has been used to solve the conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy. The enthalpy-porosity method has been used to track the solid-liquid interface of the PCM during melting process. Transient numerical simulations have been performed in order to study the influence of radius of the capsule and the Stefan number on the heat transfer rate. The simulation results show that the counter-clockwise Buoyancy driven convection over the top part of the solid PCM enhances the melting rate quite faster than the bottom part.

Thermal storage/discharge performances of Cu-Si alloy for solar thermochemical process

The present authors (Niigata University, Japan) have developed a tubular reactor system using novel “double-walled” reactor/receiver tubes with carbonate molten-salt thermal storage as a phase change material (PCM) for solar reforming of natural gas and with Al-Si alloy thermal storage as a PCM for solar air receiver to produce high-temperature air. For both of the cases, the high heat capacity and large latent heat (heat of solidification) of the PCM phase circumvents the rapid temperature change of the reactor/receiver tubes at high temperatures under variable and uncontinuous characteristics of solar radiation. In this study, we examined cyclic properties of thermal storage/discharge for Cu-Si alloy in air stream in order to evaluate a potentiality of Cu-Si alloy as a PCM thermal storage material. Temperature-increasing performances of Cu-Si alloy are measured during thermal storage (or heat-charge) mode and during cooling (or heat-discharge) mode. A oxidation state of the Cu-Si alloy after the cyclic ...