Experimental test bed design and development for PCM-water exchangers characterization

Journal article, 2018

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd Despite the thorough research on thermal energy storage (TES) techniques of the last years, especially when based on the use of phase change materials (PCMs), the release to market of efficient technologies is quite recent. For this reason it appears necessary, nowadays, to develop accurate and fast numerical tools, useful for the optimization of this technique. In this paper, the design and the development of an experimental prototype reproducing the behaviour of a PCM-Water heat exchanger with TES purposes is presented. The prototype will be used in the future for the experimental validation of a numerical model that will be used for the optimization of an innovative TES technology at low temperatures. The construction of this prototype appeared fundamental for a complete experimental validation. In fact, it allows us to recreate particular conditions that could be impossible to obtain from the in situ monitoring given the complexity of the reference system. In the end, the results obtained thanks to the protocol application have been analysed in order to decree if they could be used for the comparison between the experimental and the numerical results.