Influence of the inner tube rotation and translation associated movement on the charging performance for the latent heat thermal energy storage exchangers

Latent heat thermal energy storage technology can reduce energy consumption in buildings and improve economic performance. The inner tube movement improves the charging performance of the horizontal latent heat thermal energy storage exchangers. In order to improve the charging performance, this paper proposed a new inner tube rotation and translation associated movement mode, wrote the user-defined function based on the dynamic mesh technique, and focused on the influence of three movement modes included rotation, translation, rotation and translation associated movement on the charging performance. The results showed that the associated movement further improves the charging performance, compared with static inner tube, the charging time decreases by 53.1 %, the time average charging rate increases by 110.2 % and the average velocity of the phase change material enhances by 132.3 % under the conditions of 0.2 mm/s translation velocity and 0.4 rpm rotation velocity, compared with rotation movement individual under 0.4 rpm, the charging time decreases by 47.8 %, compared with translation movement individual under 0.2 mm/s, the charging time decreases by 21.6 %. The paper can provide a new idea for the joint active and passive optimization study, and improve the energy saving and emission reduction effect in the building energy saving.