Energy storage with solid/liquid phase change in presence of natural convection

Solid/liquid phase change process has received great attention for its capability to obtain high energy storage efficiency. In order to analyse these systems, undergoing a solid/liquid phase change, in many situations the heat transfer process can be considered conduction-dominated. However, in the past years, it has been shown that natural convection in the liquid phase can significantly influence the phase change process in terms of temperature distributions, interface displacement and energy storage. In this paper, a procedure to analyse systems undergoing liquid/solid phase change in presence of natural convection in the liquid phase based on the utilisation of a commercial computer code (FLUENT), has been developed. This procedure is applied to a cylinder cavity heated from above and filled with a Phase Change Material. It was found that when the coupling with the environment, even if small, is considered, natural convection in the liquid phase occurs. The numerical results are th...