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Experimental Studies on Performance of Latent Heat Thermal Energy Storage Unit Integrated with Solar Water Heater

G. Suganya and B. R. Ramesh Bapu

The energy storage leads to saving premium fuels and makes the system more cost effective by reducing the wastage of energy. Solar is being a renewable energy, which is used to store heat in the storage tank and PCM encapsulated copper tubes are kept inside the storage tank called PCM storage tank. Thealmost 90 copper tubes is used and phase change materials are filled in each tube. The varieties of PCM materials are analyzed, and suitable material is to be selected for thermal storage system. Copper tube encapsulated with paraffin wax (PCM) is going to be designed and fabricated to store the heat energy in PCM storage tank. Large quantity of solar thermal energy is absorbed in the day time. During charging process heat can be stored in copper tube as latent heat, the same heat can be stored during discharging process by applying cold water. The PCM used is intended to enhance the heat storage capacity of the conventional solar tanks used in domestic solar heaters and to measure inlet and outlet water temperature. The tank is continuously monitored and various sets of readings are recorded at regular time intervals and graphs are to be plotted. The temperature distribution in HTF and PCM’s are going to be analysed by using computational fluid dynamics at steady state and transient conditions.