Abstract

Several residential, commercial and industrial applications have their efficiency increased when a thermal energy storage system is incorporated. The PCMs (Phase Change Materials), due to their high latent heat of fusion, are materials that represent a viable alternative to the implementation of thermal energy storage systems. This paper presents a numerical study of RT (Rubitherm Technologies GmbH) PCMs family fusion process in cylindrical cavities. The study was conducted through a CFD ''(''Computational Fluid Dynamics) numerical simulation, with ANSYS Fluent software. The numeric model adopted is two-dimensional and has been validated with numerical and experimental results of literature, achieving a good approximation. For PCMs here studied, increasing the temperature from 10 ''^oC'' to 20 ''^oC'' and 10 ''^oC'' to 30 ''^oC'', above the phase change temperature, for liquid fractions between 0.4 and 0.8, the average reduction of fusion time is approximately 55.8% and 71.8 %, respectively.