Master’s Dissertation: Thermal Storage using Phase Change Materials

My master’s degree at Brunel University London was in Renewable Energy Engineering. My dissertation project was on simulating Thermal Energy Storage with Phase Change Materials (PCM) in TRNSYS 18.

At the time, the TRNSYS components simulating PCMs were either not suitable (e.g. PCM wall), not experimentally validated or not commercially available. I found a suitable component with good experimental validation (known as Type 840) and contacted the authors at Graz University of Technology in Austria to ask for a version compiled especially for my more recent 64-bit version of TRNSYS. So I was the first person to test the 64-bit version of TRNSYS component Type 840. I found a few problems with it, but that’s science.

TRNSYS system setup — My TRNSYS project setup, simulating a thermal solar collector water heating system with a PCM storage tank, fed with historical weather data.

The dissertation is in two parts: a scientific report on the project’s experimental procedure/results, followed by a literature review of the topic. You can review a low resolution version below. If you would like a PDF of the original document, please ask me.