Experimental Investigation of Thermal Energy Storage with Phase Changing Material

Solar energy is the most prospective source of energy in recent years. Investigation is going on to utilize the solar energy by various academicians and researchers. The main problem in harnessing and using solar energy is its discontinuous nature. Solar energy is not available continuously for 24 hours. So, there is a need to develop a method to store thermal energy during sunshine and utilise this stored energy as per requirement. Some materials available called phase changing materials (PCMs) which can store large amount of thermal energy in the form of latent heat. This energy can be used to heat the water for domestic purposes during evening hours. In this work, an experiment was carried out on parabolic solar concentrator to check the feasibility of using phase changing material as a solar energy storage medium to heat the water. Two containers were put on the concentrator to heat the same amount of water. One container was with PCM material and the other container was without PCM material. The energy efficiency of the system with pcm storage was greater than the system without pcm storage. It means that the pcm storage system is able to trap more of the incident radiation in the form of thermal energy. The exergy efficiency of the system with pcm storage was also higher than the system without pcm storage.