Phase change materials (PCMs) are drawing increasing attention of researchers nowadays, and they play a
pivotal role in thermal energy storage (TES) used in renewable energy resources applications, since these
renewable energy, such as solar energy, wind energy and tidal energy, are intermittent and not available at any
time. However, most of PCMs suffer from low thermal conductivities prolonging the charging and discharging
processes.
Metal foams with relatively high thermal conductivities, are believed to be able to enhance heat transfer
performance of PCMs for those applications. In this paper, a two-equation non-thermal equilibrium model has
been employed to tackle the phase change heat transfer problem in PCMs composites embedded into metal
foams. Numerical results show good agreement with experimental data, and indicate that a better heat transfer
performance can be achieved by using the metal foams of smaller pore size and smaller porosity, and heat
transfer performance of PCMs can be enhanced by up to 10 times by embedded metal foams into PCMs
