Controllable thermal rectification design for buildings based on phase change composites

Phase-change material (PCM) is widely used in thermal management due to their unique thermal behavior. However, related research in thermal rectifier is mainly focused on exploring the principles at the fundamental device level, which results in a gap to real applications. Here, we propose a controllable thermal rectification design towards building applications through the direct adhesion of composite thermal rectification material (TRM) based on PCM and reduced graphene oxide (rGO) aerogel to ordinary concrete walls (CWs). The design is evaluated in detail by combining experiments and finite element analysis. It is found that, TRM can regulate the temperature difference on both sides of the TRM/CWs system by thermal rectification. The difference in two directions reaches to 13.8 K at the heat flow of 80 W/m². In addition, the larger the change of thermal conductivity before and after phase change of TRM is, the more effective it is for regulating temperature difference in two directions. The stated technology has a wide range of applications for the thermal energy control in buildings with specific temperature requirements.