Modified Supporting Materials to Fabricate Form Stable Phase Change Material with High Thermal Energy Storage

Chengbin Yu; Youngseok Song

doi:10.3390/molecules28031309

Modified Supporting Materials to Fabricate Form Stable Phase Change Material with High Thermal Energy Storage

Molecules. 2023 Jan 30;28(3):1309. doi: 10.3390/molecules28031309.

Authors

Chengbin Yu¹, Youngseok Song²

Affiliations

¹ Research Institute of Advanced Materials (RIAM), Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, Republic of Korea.
² Department of Fiber Convergence Materials Engineering, Dankook University, Yongin-si 16890, Republic of Korea.

Abstract

Thermal energy storage (TES) is vital to the absorption and release of plenty of external heat for various applications. For such storage, phase change material (PCM) has been considered as a sustainable energy material that can be integrated into a power generator. However, pure PCM has a leakage problem during the phase transition process, and we should fabricate a form stable PCM composite using some supporting materials. To prevent the leakage problem during the phase transition process, two different methods, microencapsulation and 3D porous infiltration, were used to fabricate PCM composites in this work. It was found that both microsphere and 3D porous aerogel supported PCM composites maintained their initial solid state without any leakage during the melting process. Compared with the microencapsulated PCM composite, the 3D porous aerogel supported PCM exhibited a relatively high weight fraction of working material due to its high porosity. In addition, the cross-linked graphene aerogel (GCA) could reduce volume shrinkage effectively during the infiltration process, and the GCA supported PCM composite kept a high latent heat (∆H) and form stability.

Keywords: leakage; phase change material; thermal energy storage; volume shrinkage.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the GRRC program of Gyeonggi Province (GRRC Dankook 2022-B02). In addition, this research was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), funded by the Ministry of Education (2018R1A5A1024127). The authors are grateful for the support.