The impact of refrigerant inlet temperature on the ice storage process in an ice-on-coil storage plate

Abstract

The ice-on-coil storage plate is one of the core devices in the latent heat cold storage system, which benefits both energy and operation cost savings in refrigerated warehouses, especially under the peak-valley price mechanism. Although the structure design of coils and the selection of cold storage agent materials have attracted much research attention, very few research has studied the impact of refrigerant inlet temperature on the thermal performance of an ice-on-coil storage plate. To facilitate the application of ice-on-coil storage plates in the latent heat cold storage system and improve the performance, this study developed a detailed three-dimensional CFD model in ANSYS to investigate the ice storage process of the ice-on-coil storage plate with different refrigerant inlet temperatures. The results showed that a lower refrigerant inlet temperature contributes to a higher heat exchange efficiency, a bigger ice thickness in the same period of time, and a shorter time required for ice storage. And a lower refrigerant inlet temperature can also lead to a higher cold storage rate and cold storage capacity.