Thermal simulation of PCM microcapsules coated beverage bottles

Abstract

Phase change materials are passive energy storage materials, which releases significant amount of energy across phase change. This ability to function as energy reservoir can be utilized to maintain temperature. Micro encapsulation is a technique, which increases the versatility of the ways in which a phase change material can be applied. This technique also allows a greater amount of control over the concentration of the phase change material to be employed. This Project Involves simulating the time taken by a bottle with a starting temperature of 50C to reach 100C, while maintaining the environmental temperature at 300C.The time taken to do so is then compared with a coating of encapsulated PCMs. The PCM for the simulation was chosen to be Pentadecane with a fixed geometry of 30 micron diameter and 1.5 microns thickness. The simulations were run on volumes of 250ml, 330 ml and 500 ml. The choice of material for the bottles was limited to PET. The goal of the simulations was to double the time of temperature increase when compared to a bottle without a PCM coating. The starting point of all simulations was a thickness of coating equal to 100 micron and varying the weight percentage between 3% and 5%. Based on the initial simulations, subsequent sets of simulations were performed by reducing or varying the thickness as the case may be for the required volumes. The simulation results were compared to study the effect the weight percentage and the thickness has on the time taken to increase the transition from 50C to 100C