Experiments on Melting Around an Isothermal Horizontal Cylinder Under Computer Control

The melting of a solid around an isothermal horizontal cylinder is a physical phenomenon which must be understood when attempting to design a latent heat storage system. The desire to design such a system is the motivating factor in this research. To gain this understanding of the fundamental melting processes several experiments were designed, and two sets of Stefan and Rayleigh number experiments were undertaken. Experiments were also performed to determine the properties of the paraffin that was used in these investigations. During the investigations of the melting processes, the temperature was measured at several locations throughout the liquid and solid phases. The interface position was also determined photographically at several times during the experiments. These results are compared favorably with recently published numerical solutions to the governing equations. The results also show that both the interface and the temperature field data are symmetric with respect to the vertical gravitational field of force.