Numerical study on thermal behaviors of parallel plate systems for sensible thermal energy storage with heat loss

A numerical study on thermal energy storage systems with parallel plates to collect sensible heat is conducted with porous and direct model approaches. The simulations in a two-dimensional domain are performed with COMSOL Multiphysics commercial software. For the equivalent porous medium, the permeability and effective thermal conductivity as well as the specific area, and interfacial convective coefficient are numerically evaluated, considering a thermally and hydrodynamically fully developed flow. A stack of parallel plates is the system with assigned length and height, and the external heat losses effect is considered. The analysis allows to evaluate an optimized configuration as Channels Per Length (CPL) by means of a balance in the channels between pressure drop and heat transfer. Moreover, the effect of CPL values and heat loss from the parallel plate system is estimated in terms of charging time and heating capacity. The results exhibit that as the CPL increases, the time required for the charging process decreases while heat accumulation inside the system increases significantly. In fact, at the highest CPL, charging time is 2.7 times faster and the amount of heat accumulation is approximately 20% higher in adiabatic case. It is illustrated that the amount of heat accumulation inside the system varies considerably for different heat loss values. Ultimately, this study shows that porous model is more practical and accurate to be used for higher CPL cases.