An experimental and numerical method for thermal characterization of phase change materials for cold thermal energy storage

This paper seeks to establish a methodology which predicts the phase change duration and this assists the design of an optimized container sizing for cold thermal energy storage systems. The thermal characterization with numerical methods is widely used due to their versatility and low cost when compared to the experimental methods, but, to obtain reasonable results, the numerical model needs to be calibrated and validated with real data. In this work an experimental rig has been designed for phase change materials with low temperature applications. The results, obtained with pure water as PCM, have been used to validate a 1-D numerical model based on the effective capacity method and solved by MATLAB software.