Nanofluid Conductive Heat Transfer in Solidification Mechanism

Latent heat thermal energy storage systems (LHTESS), which work based on energy storage and retrieval during solid–liquid phase change is used to establish balance between energy supply and demand. LHTESS stores and retrieves thermal energy during solid–liquid phase change, while in SHTESS phase change doesn’t occur during the energy storage and retrieval process. LHTESS has a lot of advantages in comparison to SHTESS; the most important one is storing a large amount of energy during phase change process, which makes the energy storage density in LHTESS much higher than SHTESS. Due to this property, LHTESS have a wide application in different cases, such as solar air dryer, HVAC systems, electronic chip cooling, and engine heat recovery. The main restriction for these systems is thermal conductivity weakness of common PCMs. In this chapter, the method of adding nanoparticles to pure PCM and making nanoenhanced phase change material (NEPCM) and using fin with suitable array are presented to accelerate solidification process. The numerical approach, which is used in this paper is standard Galerkin finite element method.