Improvement of Thermal Conductivity and Energy Stored by Paraffin with Different Metallic Additives

Phase change thermal storage is an innovative and promising technology for saving energy. It is one of the new areas of research because it provides the solution to problems related between the provided and the required energies. Paraffin is a common phase change material (PCM) that used in many applications in thermal energy storage (TES) systems. However, the main disadvantage is their low thermal conductivities. However, using metallic additives to improve effective thermal conductivity of PCM can lead to decreasing effective heat capacity and the thermal energy stored. An experimental study is carried out to analyze the thermal behavior of the paraffin melting in a thermal cavity integrating different metals (zamak, aluminum and copper) with different configuration. The originality of study is to try to predict the best duo that respects both the improvement of thermal conductivity and energy stored. The experiments show that adding aluminum perforated plate in paraffin accelerates the melting process by about 19% and increases the energy stored by 5.18%.