Rising global energy demand and limited supply highlight the need for efficient energy storage technologies. Latent heat storage using phase change materials (PCMs) offers a promising solution, particularly for managing fluctuations in renewable energy sources. Improving system design through patterned surfaces, fins, confinement geometry, and orientation, can significantly accelerate phase transitions and enhance heat transfer, reducing PCM usage and overall costs. Such advancements enable tailored solutions for applications like electronics cooling, battery thermal management, industrial heat recovery, and building thermal regulation. Despite these significant advancement, the fundamental physics of heat transfer enhancement remain insufficiently explored, motivating this study on melting dynamics under varied surface geometries, heating patterns, and orientations. Rayleigh-Bénard convection in phase change materials (PCMs) is a widely studied problem due to its unique physical characteristics and broad relevance to natural and engineering systems. Heat transfer during phase change is governed by both thermal diffusion and buoyancy-driven convection, with confinement geometry strongly influencing convection development.  Variations in geometry, orientation, heater shape, and heating patterns significantly modify this behavior, forming the focus of the present study. The fundamental objectives of the present study are to develop an experimental setup capable of measuring temperature response and visualizing melt front evolution and convection patterns in phase change materials. A computational framework based on the enthalpy-porosity finite volume method is formulated to simulate melting dynamics undertime-varying heat flux boundary conditions. The study further investigates thermal convection physics in semi-circular PCM confinements subjected to constant heat flux, as well as under fluctuating heat input. Further, the influence of confinement inclination during heat transfer through patterned surfaces is also examined. Finally, heat transfer correlations are developed for PCM systems operating under both constant and time-varying heat flux conditions.