A study on evaluation of effective thermal conductivity for spherical capsules

Abstract

Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.The main goal of the current work is to evaluate specific equations to define effective thermal conductivity for inward melting problems inside spherical containers in terms of the temperature difference and the spacing between the interface and shell. Sets of numerical analyses have been conducted with commercial CFD software ANSYS-FLUENT. In order to check the validity of the method, proposed effective thermal conductivity equation has been implemented into a phase change problem inside a spherical container, and the results are compared with the experimental findings. Comparative results reveal that implementation of the effective thermal conductivity yields reasonable results regarding to the experimental measurements