Natural Convective Heat Transfer Characteristics of the Bundle Heat Exchanger in the Latent Heat Microcapsulated Phase Change Material Slurry

As a novel latent functionally thermal fluid, microcapsulated phase change material slurry (MPCMS) has many potential applications in the fields of energy storage, air-conditioning, refrigeration and heat exchanger, etc. In order to investigate the heat storage and heat transfer performance of MPCMS, natural convection in a rectangular enclosure heated by bundle heat exchanger has been studied numerically in this paper. The effects of mass concentration (Cm) of MPCMS, the vertical spaces of bundle heat exchanger on the natural convective heat transfer are investigated. The results indicate that, MPCMS with Cm=30% shows the best natural convectionperformance, and a lower position of bundle heat exchanger can strengthen the natural convection.