Numerical Investigation of Melting With Internal Heat Generation in a Vertical Cylindrical Geometry

There have been significant efforts by the heat transfer community to investigate the melting phenomenon of materials. These efforts have included the analytical development of equations to represent melting, the numerical development of computer codes to assist in the modeling, and the collection of experimental data. The understanding of the melting phenomenon has application in several areas of interest, for example, the melting of a phase change material used as a thermal storage medium as well as the melting of the fuel bundle in a nuclear power plant during an accident scenario. The objective of this paper is to present a numerical investigation, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), of melting with internal heat generation for a vertical cylindrical geometry. As a precursor to the development of this numerical model, two classical configurations were also modeled. The first configuration consists of pure convection (no phase change) of a liquid with an external heat source and the second is melting with an externally applied heat source. For both of these two configurations, the numerical results were compared with experimental data from previous work.