Comparison of Stratification in a Water Tank and a PCM-Water Tank

Most of the storage systems available on the market use water as storage medium. Enhancing the storage performance is necessary to increase the performance of most systems. The stratification phenomenon is employed to improve the efficiency of storage tanks. Heat at an intermediate temperature, not high enough to heat up the top layer, can still be used to heat the lower, colder layers. There are a lot of parameters to study the stratification in a water tank such as the Mix Number and the Richardson Number among others. The idea studied here was to use these stratification parameters to compare two tanks with the same dimensions during charging and discharging processes. One of them is a traditional water tank and the other is a PCM-water (a water tank with a Phase Change Material). A PCM is good because it has high energy density if there is a small temperature change, since then the latent heat is much larger than the sensible heat. On the other hand, the temperature change in the top layer of a hot water store with stratification is usually small as it is held as close as possible at or above the temperature for usage. In the system studied the Phase Change Material is placed at the top of the tank, therefore the advantages of the stratification still remain. The aim of this work is to demonstrate that the use of PCM in the upper part of a water tank holds or improves the benefit of the stratification phenomenon.