Numerical Investigation of Heat Exchange and Convective Heat Transfer in a Building Room with In-Wall Embedded PCM

This paper presents a two-dimensional numerical investigation to study the heat exchanging and the convective heat transfer coefficient inside a building room during the heating cooling seasons. Three walls of the room are insulated, and the remained wall is constructed with brick that is embedded with phase change material (PCM). The mathematical model is based on pure conduction in brick and PCM, and on the Boussinesq model for the natural convection in the indoor air; the non-insulated wall is subjected to a constant temperature at the external surfaces. The enthalpy method is used to resolve energy equations in both solid and liquid phases of PCM. The conservation of masse and momentum equations are resolved by using Ansys-Fleunt code. The model developed in this study is analyzed and compared with literature, and a good agreement is showed. Then, a parametric study for different geometrical and thermo-physical parameters of the building room is conducted.