Numerical Study on Heat Transfer Performance of Solar Vacuum Tube Collector with Integrated Metal Fins Filled with Paraffin

Solar collector integrated with phase change materials (PCMs) for solar collection and storage of thermal energy is one potential trend of integrated solar buildings. But a negative aspect of PCMs is that most of these materials suffer from inherent low thermal conductivity. In order to enhance phase change heat transfer, heat transfer of compound phase change material using metal fins with phase change material was studied in this work. A numerical model was used to describe the heat transfer for the metal fins and PCMs in this paper. The melting/solidifying process of double-glazed vacuum tube with metal fins filled with phase change energy storage was simulated. The results showed that the metal fins play a great role in heat transfer enhancement for the phase change energy storage in the solar vacuum tube collector. The metal fins acts to substantially decrease the heat résistance in the heat solar absorption process of paraffin.