Numerical Analysis of Heat Transfer in Double-Pane Window (of an Electric Bus) Filled with Phase Change Material

This research primarily analyzes heat transfer inside a double-pane window of an electric bus. Phase-change material (PCM) is filled between two glasses to investigate its effect on heat transfer by conducting a numerical simulation on a commercial software of ANSYS-Fluent. 3-D transient heat conduction and solidification-melting model considering enthalpy-porosity approach have been solved in glass and PCM to obtain the temperature distribution. The main objective of this work is to reduce the energy consumption of the batteries used for air conditioning by storing the energy in a phase-change material. A solar heat flux on the glass window is set to 800 W/m2. Then the absorbed heat is conducted through the external glass (on the ambient side), PCM, and internal glass (on the cabin side) before entering the bus cabin. The PCM layer and glass thickness are considered to be 14 mm and 5 mm, respectively. Convective heat transfer takes place from the internal glass surface to the bus cabin with a convective heat transfer coefficient of 9 W/m2-K. The simulation for this problem was carried out for 5 h (18,000 s). The average surface temperature and liquid fraction at various times were noted and plotted for a thorough discussion. A substantial temperature reduction of about 5.73% was achieved using PCM.