Simulations of paraffine melting inside metal foams at different gravity levels with preliminary experimental validation

In this work, the results of a numerical code based on the porous media Local Thermal Non-Equilibrium (LTNE) and the apparent heat capacity methods, are compared with experiments aiming at a preliminary validation. The test cell consists in a 50 mm aluminum foam cube filled with a paraffin wax, heated and cooled on the same face. The heat flux is measured by two miniaturized sensors, while the temperature is measured in three different locations along the cube edge. Finally, one side is equipped with a Zinc Selenide window which is transparent to the long wave InfraRed. This system allows to track the paraffin melting front evolution together with the temporal trend of the whole temperature distribution simplifying the comparison with the numerical outputs at different time steps. The numerical model is then set with the same boundary conditions (heat flux) to predict the experimental temperature fields, considering both conduction in the solid domain and natural convection in the liquid domain. The preliminary validation shows that the numerical results match the experimental data with good agreement. Results are also presented for different gravity levels. This study can be a starting point for all those applications where gravity has a major role.