Recently, uncertainty of demand and supply for energy has expanded as energy market changes rapidly. Many people have focused thermal storage more and more when demands of energy increase. Therefore, many studies on plans for using efficient energy have been proceeded.
Rapid accumulation technology of cold heat is a method for decreasing the gap between demand and supply of time, quantity and quality of heat energy. It is stored rapidly when electric power is on. And cold heat energy in PCM heat storage is used in refrigerator when electric power is off. Porous media for cold heat is phase change material. Developed countries have generally acted faster for using efficient thermal energy storage than developing countries when electric power shortage happened. So, in the developing countries goods like meats, fishes, vegetables in refrigerator have not retained because they are not well prepared about power outage. Consequently, they need to improve performance of refrigerator. The present study has been conducted for improving performance of cold heat storage in refrigerator using characteristics on latent heat and phase change of phase change material.
Phase change material is automatically a adjustable material as it changes from solid to liquid, liquid to solid depending on temperature. Chemical molecular array of phase change material is stable during process of phase change since physical molecular array of phase change material only varies with phase change.
Based on the result for this system simulation to use characteristic of phase change material, this study provide basic data to improve performance of cold heat in refrigerator. Also, this study predicts and measures specific points in PCM heat storage during process of phase change. This computation fluid dynamic has been conducted to use Visual Fortran 6.0, ANSYS workbench ver.13.0, ANSYS CFX ver.13.0, ANSYS Fluent ver.13.0.
Design variables of PCM heat storage are diameter, height of cylindrical fin and width, height of rectangular fin. This study has been conducted for heat transfer coefficient and cooling time of PCM cold heat storage when changing design variables through the computation fluid dynamic and experiment.