Structural Characteristics and Thermal Performances of Eutectic Mixture Adsorbed into Modified Porous Wood Char in Vacuum Environment

Abstract

The rapid development of society consumes a lot of energy. Phase change materials (PCMs) can provide significant heat storage to improve natural energy applications. However, organic PCMs have the problem of easy leakage of liquid phase, which limits their application in the field of energy storage. The primary goal of this work is to improve leakage and thermal conductivity of phase change materials. In this work, CW1000 was used as a porous biomass carrier and lauric acid (LA), paraffin wax (PW), and tetradecanol (TD) were used as raw materials. Two modified biomass carbonized wood based composite phase change materials (CPCMs) were prepared by vacuum impregnation. The LA-PW/CW1000 and LA-TD/CW1000 have load rates of 50% and 60%, respectively allowing for better packing of LA-PW and LA-TD. The thermal conductivity of LA-PW/CW1000 and LA-TD/CW1000 is 67.05% and 23.59% higher than that of LA-PW and LA-TD, respectively. In addition, the undercooling of LA-PW/CW1000 decreased by 1.95 °C compared to LA-PW, while LA-TD/CW1000 decreased by 3.33 °C compared to LA-TD. Meanwhile, LA-PW/CW1000 exhibited better thermal cycling stability and chemical stability after 200 cycles.