Multiphase Science and Technology, 30(2-3):121–134 (2018) INVESTIGATION ON LATENT THERMAL ENERGY STORAGE WITH PARALLEL SQUARED CHANNEL SYSTEMS Assunta Andreozzi, 1 Bernardo Buonomo, 2 Davide Ercole, 2,* & Oronzio Manca 2 1 Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Napoli, Italy 2 Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale e dell’Informazione, Università degli Studi della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli," Aversa (CE), Italy *Address all correspondence to: Davide Ercole, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale e dell’Informazione, Università degli Studi della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli," Aversa (CE), Italy, E-mail: spdas@iitm.ac.in A computational analysis of a transient thermal control device using phase change material (PCM) is carried out in this work. The investigated configuration is a honeycomb solid checkerboard matrix filled with PCM. The honeycomb is a set of different parallel squared channels; half of the channels are filled with PCM and the other ones are passed through by the working fluid. Various configura- tions are investigated for different channels per unit of length (CPL), heat fluxes, and inlet velocities. A comparison between the direct honeycomb model and a porous medium model is made. The porous medium is modeled with the Darcy-Forchheimer law, and a local thermal nonequilibrium condi- tion is assumed to analyze the heat exchange between the solid and fluid phases. The characteristics such as permeability, inertial resistant coefficient, effective thermal conductivity, and interfacial heat transfer are calculated using the results of the direct honeycomb model; the values are compared with the porous medium model, successively. The numerical analysis is carried out employing the Ansys- Fluent 15.0 code. Results in terms of melting time, temperature fields, and stored energy as function of time are presented for the charging and discharging phase. KEY WORDS: latent thermal energy storage, parallel squared channel systems, PCM, numerical analysis, charge and discharge 1. INTRODUCTION Systems for energy management and storage are broadly used in many industrial and commer- cial applications to supply thermal energy. The intermittent nature of solar radiation can lead to discrepancies between demand and heat source availability. The addition of thermal energy storage (TES) systems makes it possible to redirect excess energy produced during the daytime to nighttime or periods of unfavorable meteorological conditions, thus making the power system more efficient, flexible, and reliable (Antoni et al., 2010). In the TES system, energy is stored by changing the temperature of a storage medium or employing the latent heat of phase change material (PCM) (Zhou et al., 2012). PCMs have the possibility to store the energy during the phase change process, maintaining the temperature nearly constant; the tradeoff, however, is the 0276–1459/18/$35.00 © 2018 by Begell House, Inc. www.begellhouse.com 121