Modified T-History Method for Measuring Thermophysical Properties of Phase Change Materials at High Temperature

Latent heat storage using phase change materials (PCMs) can be used to store large amounts of energy in a narrow temperature difference during phase transition. The thermophysical properties of PCMs such as latent heat, specific heat and melting and solidification temperature need to be defined at high precision for the design and estimating the cost of latent heat storage systems. The existing laboratory standard methods, such as differential thermal analysis (DTA) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), use a small sample size (1-10 mg) to measure thermophysical properties, which makes these methods suitable for homogeneous elements. In addition, this small amount of sample has different thermophysical properties when compared with the bulk sample and may have limitations for evaluating the properties of mixtures. To avoid the drawbacks in existing methods, the temperature -history (T-history) method can be used with bulk quantities of PCM salt mixtures to characterize PCMs. This paper presents a modified T-history setup, which was designed and built at the University of South Australia to measure the melting point, heat of fusion, specific heat, degree of supercooling and phase separation of salt mixtures for a temperature range between 200 degrees C and 400 degrees C. Sodium Nitrate (NaNO3) was used to verify the accuracy of the new setup.