Heat Absorbing and Releasing Experiments with Improved Phase-change Thermal Storage Canisters

This article, based on authors' long-term study, proposes an improved foamed-Ni-packed phase-change thermal storage canister, which takes advantage of the foamed-Ni characteristic of instinctive porous structure and excellent properties to ameliorate its void distribution and thermal conductivity. The improved canister and the unimproved one without foamed-Ni package, are put to heat absorbing and releasing tests to investigate the effects of heat absorbing temperature upon the phase-change materials (PCM) melting time under three temperature schemes by using platinum resistance thermometers (PT100) and data acquisition modules (ADAM-4000) to gather the data of varying temperature. Afterwards, the computerized tomography (CT) is employed to scan the void distribution in both canisters. Compared to the unimproved canister, the experimental results evidence the superiority of the improved one in higher uniformity in void and temperature distribution as well as faster thermal responses.