2020/10/21 by Drew Lilley, Lilley, Drew, Jonathan C. Lau +7
Engineering · Materials Science · #Advanced Thermoelectric Materials and Devices #FOS: Physical sciences #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Phase Change Materials Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2010.11298
openalex publication_date 2020/10/21 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Phase change material based thermal energy storage has many current and\npotential applications in the heating and cooling of buildings, battery and\nelectronics thermal management, thermal textiles, and dry cooling of power\nplants. However, connecting lab scale thermal data obtained on DSC to the\nperformance of large-scale practical systems has been a major challenge\nprimarily due to the dependence of supercooling on the size and temperature\ngradient of the system. In this work we show how a phase change material's\nsupercooling behavior can be characterized experimentally using common lab\nscale thermal analysis techniques. We then develop a statistics based\ntheoretical model that uses the lab scale data on small samples to\nquantitatively predict the supercooling performance for a general thermal\nenergy storage application of any size with temperature gradients. Finally, we\nvalidate the modeling methodology by comparing to experimental results for\nsolid-solid phase change in neopentyl glycol, which shows how the model\nsuccessfully predicts the changes in supercooling temperature across a large\nrange of cooling rates (2 orders of magnitude) and volumes (3 orders of\nmagnitude). By accounting for thermal gradients, the model avoids ~2x error\nincurred by lumped approximations.\n