Efficient numerical approach for simulating a full scale vertical ice-on-coil type latent thermal storage tank

The present research proposes a new efficient numerical approach to analyze the phase changes of a full scale vertical ice-on-coil type latent thermal energy storage (LTES) tank. Experiments were conducted to validate the proposed method. Most previous studies have been forced to adopt over-simplified assumptions in order to analyze a full scale tank because of the tremendous computer memory and long calculation time required. Usually only one tube has been analyzed to estimate the charging and discharging performance of the whole system, based on the assumption that this tube represents the whole LTES tank. The proposed method overcomes the drawbacks of the existing approaches by sampling a few tubes and interpolating the whole tubes. The number of tubes to be calculated is thereby significantly reduced while preserving high accuracy. The proposed method is validated by (1) comparison with a reduced full simulation of 20 tubes and (2) experiment.