Thermal management of cold storage unit in existence of nano-sized additive using Galerkin method

Abstract

In the current articles, a numerical approach is developed to analyze the unsteady freezing process within a wavy container embedded with porous foam. The incorporation of porous foam, along with the addition of nanoparticles and radiative cooling, significantly accelerates the solidification process. These methods enhance thermal conduction within the system, which in turn improves the efficiency of cold energy storage, making them highly beneficial for applications requiring rapid cooling. The governing equations are derived by incorporating source terms related to the freezing, and the Galerkin technique is employed to solve these equations. The use of an adaptive grid technique ensures accurate representation of the moving solid–liquid interface, or ice front, during the simulation. Validation results demonstrate excellent agreement with experimental data, underscoring the importance of using adaptive meshing in capturing the transient dynamics of the freezing process. The findings reveal that the insertion of porous foam declines the needed time about 81.14%, significantly boosting the overall efficiency of the system. Furthermore, the utilizing nano-powders decline freezing time about 6.87%. Additionally, incorporating radiative cooling into the system further speeds up the freezing process by around 10.86%. These improvements highlight the combined benefits of using porous materials, nanotechnology, and radiative cooling for optimizing cold energy storage systems. The reduction in freezing time demonstrated in this study, particularly the 81.14% improvement with porous foam insertion, represents a noteworthy step forward in cold energy storage technology.