Experimental study on heat transfer performance of mPCM slurry flow in microchannels

Experimental setup has been designed and tested for local heat transfer performance of mPCM slurry flow inside the microchannels under convective boundary condition following unique inverse method. The heat transfer data were collected at ninety-eight precise locations along the flow direction of mPCM slurry inside six microchannels. The experimental setup was validated for both pure water and mPCM slurry with available published literature and found to be in good agreement. The experiments were conducted with mPCM slurry for 5–10% mass concentration and laminar regime (Re = 200–1700) and compared with pure water under the same operating conditions. The effect of mass concentration on the local Nusselt number, average Nusselt number (Nu_avg), pressure drop, Stefan number and bulk fluid temperature difference was investigated. The average Nu was enhanced by 12.1% and 28.3% than pure water for mass concentration of 5% and 10% mPCM slurry, respectively. Moreover, a correlation was developed to predict the average Nusselt number in laminar regime for convective boundary condition. The developed correlation predicted experimental data of this study within ± 15%.