Coupled thermal simulation of solidification in an irregular cold storage structure enhanced with nanoparticles and porous materials

This study provides an in-depth numerical investigation focused on increasing the efficiency of system by incorporating porous metal foam and hybrid nanofluids into the storage system. A novel model was formulated to model the transient solidification, where the buoyancy effect is intentionally omitted to streamline the computational workload. Unlike many earlier studies, the influence of radiative heat transfer is explicitly incorporated into the model. The equations are simplified into two principal forms and solved employing the Galerkin weighted residual approach. Time-dependent terms are discretized using an implicit method, while an adaptive meshing strategy is applied to enhance spatial resolution, particularly around the phase change boundary. The simulation outcomes indicate that employing porous foam greatly enhances heat conduction, resulting in a 77% reduce in solidification time. The presence of hybrid nanoparticles further improves solidification performance by 31.66%, and the consideration of radiation cooling contributes an additional 5.58% reduction. Collectively, these enhancements lead to a total solidification time reduction of approximately 84.28%. This acceleration in phase change is largely due to elevated thermal conductivity and a more even temperature distribution across the system.