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An experimental investigations of the melting of RT44HC inside a horizontal rectangular test cell subject to uniform wall heat flux
journal contribution
posted on 2019-06-27, 09:08 authored by Mohamed Fadl, Philip C. EamesThis study experimentally investigates the effect of different values of wall heat flux intensity on the
melting of RT44HC Phase Change Material (PCM) in a rectangular test cell. A new novel experimental test
rig to provide accurate data for the validation of numerical models of phase change was developed. The
designed and constructed test rig consists of a horizontal rectangular cross-section test cell formed from
polycarbonate sheet with copper plates and mica heaters to provide controlled uniform wall heat flux.
Experiments were performed for three constant uniform wall heat flux values (q00
wall = 675, 960 and
1295 W/m2
) applied to both left and right sides of the test cell. An imaging technique was used to visualize and record the movement of the solid-liquid interface using a Canon EOS DSLR Camera. The results
obtained show a strong correlation between the magnitude of wall heat flux which drives the convective
heat transfer and melt fraction development in the PCM. The results also show that increasing the input
power from 675 W/m2 to 960 W/m2 to 1295 W/m2 reduces the total time for the melting process by
26.3% and 42.10% respectively. The raw data set comprised of measured temperatures and observation
of melt fraction development provide a useful data set for validation of numerical models aiming to simulate the melting process in a rectangular cross-section test cell.
Funding
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) EP/N021304/1 and EP/K011847/1
History
School
- Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
Published in
International Journal of Heat and Mass TransferVolume
140Pages
731 - 742Citation
FADL, M.S. and EAMES, P.C., 2019. An experimental investigations of the melting of RT44HC inside a horizontal rectangular test cell subject to uniform wall heat flux. International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, 140, September, pp. 731 - 742Publisher
© The Authors. Published by Elsevier LtdVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Acceptance date
2019-06-13Publication date
2019-06-18Copyright date
2019Notes
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).ISSN
0017-9310Publisher version
Language
- en