Two‐region semi‐analytical solution for latent heat thermal energy storage systems

Abstract

Problems with latent heat thermal storage (LHTS) often contain several boundary conditions that an exact solution cannot solve. Therefore, novel methods to tackle such issues could fundamentally change the design of innovative energy storage systems. This study concentrates on the reformulation of the generalized differential quadrature method (GDQM) for the two-region freezing/melting Stefan problem as an essential LHTS challenge. Comparison and convergence show that there is sufficient confidence in the proposed approach. By monitoring the precision of the suggested approach for the LHTS problem, it was indicated that this method's error depends on Stefan's number. The maximum error of all Stefan numbers up to 0.3 is less than 6%. For such applications in a standard array of LHTS (Stefan numbers between 0 and 0.2), the proposed method is appropriate as it predicts the answers with a maximum of 4.2% error. In comparison to the heat capacity method, GDQM delivers a more precise result at higher processing times. Additionally, this GDQM priority is accompanied by a low computational cost, which is unquestionably superior.