Innovative pcm capsule design for cool thermal storage performance enhancement

Abstract

Globally, 40% of the total energy generated is invested in the building sector and, inside any building among all the devices, space cooling/heating devices consume the maximum electricity. The increase in global population will demand huge surge in building construction where a massive cooling/heating requirement will be needed. In India, the space cooling in the building sector will grow by 11 times by 2037 from the base year 2017 which opens enormous opportunity for the cool thermal energy storage (CTES) integration to tackle the building cooling energy demand. In the recent years, policy makers of developing and developed nations have adopted solar PV power generation as clean, efficient and sustainable technology. The utilisation and conversion of freely available solar energy to produce cool energy integrated with the concept of storage will make the CTES system commercially strong. However, among all the CTES technologies, encapsulated cool thermal storage has numerous advantages over the others. In an encapsulated cool thermal storage, numerous phase change material (PCM) filled capsules are used as the cool thermal storage. Generally, a chiller is utilised for the supply of the cooling energy needs to charge these PCMs. However, the decelerated rate of PCM solidification inside these capsules is a major concern for the chiller operation. Major PCM mass near the surface of the capsules solidifies at a faster rate compared to a small fraction of mass present near the center of capsule which freeze at a much slower rate, which results into non uniform rate of energy charging and also mcreases the charging duration. newlineConsidering the importance of space cooling in the building sector and the rising opportunity of CTES system due to increase in renewable sources integration globally, there is a dire need to study the role of capsule geometry newline newline