Journal
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING JOURNAL
Volume 353, Issue -, Pages 920-929Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE SA
DOI: 10.1016/j.cej.2018.07.185
Keywords
Flexible characteristic; Binary mixture; Polymer gel; Form-stable PCM; Thermal energy storage
Categories
Funding
- Natural Science Foundation of China [51678488]
- Youth Science and Technology Innovation Team of Sichuan Province of Building Environment and Energy Efficiency [2015TD0015]
- Key Research Projects of Applied Basic in Sichuan [2017JY0253]
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Flexible phase-change materials (PCMs) have great potential applicability in thermal energy storage and temperature control. A binary composite mixture comprising polyethylene glycols of solid and liquid phases (PEG2000 and PEG400, respectively) was synthesized as a PCM base material. The PEG400 liquid phase was uniformly dispersed in the PEG2000 phase-change crystal on a molecular scale, thus creating many micro-and nanocrystals of PEG2000 via polycrystalline growth from a single crystal. To retain solidity and flexibility in the composite's melted state, hydrogel technology and low-temperature drying were applied. We prepared flexible polymer gel shaped PCMs by adding sodium stearate (NaR) to the binary fused mixture. Needle-shaped NaR crystal grains of several hundred nanometers formed three-dimensional network structures, binding the binary flexible PCM within the network structure to form a polymer gel. These geometric structures not only achieve the solid-liquid PCM structure but also maintain flexibility in both the melted and solidified states (20-80 degrees C). The latent heats of melting and solidification for the polymer gel were 109.7 and 107.2 J/g, accounting for 87.5% and 85.8% of the PP20 binary eutectic, respectively. The demonstrated use of polymer gels provides a new route for investigating PCMs for heat storage.
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