Numerical Investigation on Charging Discharging of a PCM Using PV and Thermal Oil for Injera Baking Application.

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Date

2023-06

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Addis Ababa University

Abstract

Millions of Ethiopians rely on bio mass, charcoal, and animal dung to supply their energy demands. All of this energy is used to bake injera, more than 50%. This traditional biomass based baking has an impact on women's and children's he alth, energy, and ability to attend school. Due to its abundant and readily accessible renewable energy source, solar energy had been considered to be a good alternative for cooking. However, because of its intermittent nature, there is a mismatch between the load and the solar energy that is available for the baking purpose, so a thermal storage system that provides the necessary energy has been integrated. T his study investigates th e thermal characteristic of the charging and discharge processes and main heat transfer processes in the injera baking system with PV which was integrated with the thermal storage system T his study was conducted beginning with review ing related papers, system design, data collection and data analysis in addition, performed m athematical and numerical model s and numerical simulation was conducted using a finite difference computational model for the thermal storages that was PCM and thermal oil The thermal oil was used to store energy and to transfer heat, furthermore, the dev eloped computational models are analyzed using MA TLAB programming software. F rom the numerical simulation result by using solar radiation data of Addis Ababa showed that the thermal storage has the capacity to store about 3 3 MJ during charging using const ant heat flux which was from the PV The amount of energy discharged from the PCM was 13.1 MJ and from the thermia oil was 3 .5 0 MJ by using natural convection heat transfer and the discharging and overall efficiency of the system w ere about 50.2 and 46.67 respectively. Also, the baking pan surface temperature stayed between 220 o c and 1 46.4 o c for about three hours . T his result was compared with different papers and it can be concluded that the numerical ly investigated solar powered Injera baking integrated with thermal storage showed a promising result.

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Keywords

PCM, Thermal Energy Storage System,PV, Thermal Oil

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