Experimental investigation of a composite phase change material: Thermal-energy storage and release

In recent times, composites made out of polymers and paraffin waxes were thought to be good thermal energy storage materials, in which the heat is stored as latent heat of fusion in the paraffin wax. In this study, phase change composite material with spherical shape calibrated based paraffin wax (RT27) was produced. The properties of the prepared composite phase change material have been characterized. The objective of this article was to study the energy storage and the energy recovery by using a phase change composite material. An experimental set-up consisting of fluxmetric measurement has been constructed to provide the thermal performance of the composite. In addition, a differential scanning calorimetry analysis was carried out. The experimental apparatus allows providing heat storage capacities and "apparent" thermal conductivities of the composite at the solid and liquid states, and also a measurement of the latent heat of fusion. The proposed test provides temperature and heat flux measurements at the material borders. The amount of energy exchanged during the variation of the thermodynamic state samples could be calculated when the boundary temperatures vary. In this article, one shows how it can allow the study of complex composite material with PCM. In particular, heat flux measurements make it possible to highlight very specific behaviors of these products and are thus a very interesting experimental source of data which comes to complete the traditional measurement methods like calorimetric device (differential scanning calorimetry). © 2012 The Author(s).