Computational Simulation of Natural Convection in a Porous Cavity Packed With a Nano‐Encapsulated Phase Change Material‐Water Mixture and Fitted With an Exothermic Circular Battery Cell

ABSTRACT The steady‐state natural convective heat transfer and flow dynamics over a heat‐generating cylindrical battery enclosed in a water‐ nano‐encapsulated phase change material (NEPCM)‐saturated porous cavity are numerically addressed. The generating cell is covered with a thermally conductive material ( copper ). The cavity exhibits left and right vertical walls of constant cold temperature (), and insulated lower and upper walls. Adopting the local thermal equilibrium (LTE) approach among the fluid and the porous structure, the dimensionless Darcy‐Brinkman (DB) equations are numerically handled via the Galerkin weighted residual (GWR) based finite element method (FEM) associated with the Newton–Raphson scheme. The impact of key parameters was thoroughly studied to grasp the flow and heat transfer. The results, illustrated by streamlines, isotherms, heat capacity curves ( melting ‐ solidification zones ), and maximum cell core temperature, highlight the substantive effect of these control parameters. An increase in was shown to significantly improve convection, thereby reducing the cell core temperature. It turned out that an increase in from 10 −5 to 10 −1 decreases by up to 22.6%. Likewise, a rise in porosity () from 0.1 to 0.9 sweeps away an additional reduction of 10.5%. Increasing NEPCM's seeding improves both thermal conduction and latent heat absorption, while a lower improves melting dynamics and thermal response. As for the heat release parameter , its effect seems to be the dominant, with almost linear increases in core temperature as increases. Comparisons to previous research corroborated the current findings. All in all, this study sheds light on the mechanisms of heat transfer in lithium‐ion batteries (LIBs) and/or other thermal energy storage (TES) systems using a water‐NEPCM mixture and paves the way for further application‐based research.