During charging and discharging process, due to natural convection, latent heat thermal energy storage (LHTES) experiences a non uniform heat transfer process in which higher heat transfer generally occurs at the upper area of LHTES. To overcome this issue, a rotating LHTES is proposed and is expected to have higher and more uniform heat transfer. Hence, this study is conducted to evaluate the potential of heat transfer enhancement of latent heat thermal energy storage by rotation. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for conjugate heat transfer between heat transfer fluid (HTF) and phase change material (PCM) in the latent heat thermal energy storage which experiences charging-discharging process is developed and validated against the experimental measured data. An enthalpy-porosity formulation is adopted to take into account the melting and solidification process of the PCM. For performance evaluation, thermal enhancement ratio (TER) is introduced and defined as the ratio of heat transfer rate enhancement due to rotation to the heat transfer rate of the base case (stationary). This ratio takes into account the parasitic energy needed for rotation. The results reveal that rotation does increase the heat transfer performance of LHTES with up to 25% and 41% enhancement can be achieved during charging and discharging, respectively. In addition, it was found that rotational speed posses significant influence on the performance of rotating LHTES where, for the studied cases, higher rotation speed results in higher heat transfer rate. This study serves as a guideline in designing innovative high performance rotating LHTES.

在充电和放电过程中，由于自然对流，潜热热能储存器（LHTES）经历了不均匀的热传递过程，在该过程中，通常在LHTES的上部区域发生更高的热传递。为了克服这个问题，提出了旋转的LHTES，并期望其具有更高和更均匀的传热。因此，进行这项研究以评估通过旋转增强潜热热能存储的传热潜力。针对潜热储能过程中传热流体（HTF）与相变材料（PCM）之间共轭传热的计算流体动力学（CFD）模型进行了开发，并针对实验测量数据进行了验证。采用焓-孔隙度配方来考虑PCM的熔化和固化过程。为了进行性能评估，引入了热增强率（TER），并将其定义为由于旋转引起的热传递率增强与基本壳体（固定）的热传递率之比。该比率考虑了旋转所需的寄生能量。结果表明，旋转确实提高了LHTES的传热性能，在充电和放电过程中分别可以提高25％和41％。此外，发现转速对旋转LHTES的性能有重大影响，在所研究的情况下，较高的转速会导致较高的传热速率。