1991 Volume 8 Issue 2 Pages 141-150
In direct contact melting, it is clear that one of factors that affect the heat transfer is the size of heat transfer surface. This indicates that the shorter the path through which the liquid between the heat transfer surface and the solid PCM is rejected outside, the thinner the liquid melt, which decreases the thermal resistance between source and PCM. In the present work, it was investigated how the heat transfer can be promoted by machining slots on the disk-type heat transfer surface and dividing it into lots of sector-shaped sections, through theoretical analysis and numerical simulation. Numerical simulation, which includes only the effect of heat conduction in liquid layer, shows a good agreement with experiments reported in other literature. Also, it was turned out that prediction equation yielded by theoretical analysis gives not only the qualitative explanation of the increase of heat flux, but also the quantitative prediction on the heat flux with an adequate accuracy. Summarizing those results, the enhancement of heat transfer can be apparently achieved according to the number of splits.
