Experimental and numerical investigations on the effects of different tilt angles on the phase change material melting process in a rectangular container

Abstract

This paper presents the experimental and the numerical investigations to examine the effects of different tilt angles on the melting characteristic of the PCM as a passive cooling material inside a rectangular container. The experimental and the numerical tests are performed at four different angles, namely, 0o, 30o, 60o, and 90o, by applying heat on one of the rectangular container's walls filled with PCM at a constant temperature of 373 K. The purpose of the numerical study is to assess the possibility of analyzing the PCM melting characteristics accurately using a simulation model in ANSYS Fluent. The experimental and numerical results show good agreement with the satisfactory error ratios ranging between 4% and 6%. The results also show that the decrease in the PCM container tilt angle leads to the increase in the time taken for the melting process of PCM to complete. This is due to the diminishing effects of the convection heat transfer as the tilt angle is reduced. In general, a shorter time taken for complete melting of the PCM indicating a better cooling performance. Therefore, in this paper we have concluded that the PCM's cooling performance can be improved by increasing the tilt angle closer to the vertical angle (90o).