In this part of the paper, the performance of the simultaneous charging/discharging operation modes of the heat pipe heat exchanger with latent heat storage is experimentally studied. The experimental results show that the device may operate under either the fluid to fluid heat transfer with charging heat to the phase change material (PCM) or the fluid to fluid heat transfer with discharging heat from the PCM modes according to the initial temperature of the PCM. The melting/solidification curves, the performances of the heat pipes and the device, the influences of the inlet temperature and the mass flow rate of the cold water on the operation performance are investigated by extensive experiments. The experimental results also disclose that under the simultaneous charging/discharging operation mode, although the heat transfer from the hot water directly to the cold water may vary, it always takes up a major part of the total heat recovered by the cold water due to the very small thermal resistance compared with the thermal resistance of the PCM side. The melting/solidification processes taking place in the simultaneous charging/discharging operation are compared with those in the charging only and discharging only processes. By applying a simplified thermal resistance analysis, a criterion for predicting the exact operation modes was derived and used to explain the observed experimental phenomena. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.