Abstract

Nanoencapsulated phase change materials (nePCM) are currently under research for heat storage applications. Owing to the difficulty arising in this field, both experimental and numerical communities join efforts in order to reach a better understanding of the physical phenomena involved. One of the main concerns regarding these nePCMs is that after some cycles of heating and cooling, the shell that confines the PCM fails due to the stresses developed during these processes. Mechanically, the failure of the nanoparticle shell is due to thermal stresses and, consequently, the calculation of heat propagation in nanoparticles becomes a relevant issue. On this ground, the aim of this work is to develop a numerical formulation within the finite element method (FEM) for metallic pure substances and alloys since both are used as PCM in nanoparticles. The former case is of special relevance from a numerical perspective since regularization techniques are required to avoid numerical errors when describing phase change. Finally, temperature distributions inside nePCM are calculated, which will be used for thermal stress calculations in future works.