Highly Efficient Thermal Energy Storage Using a Hybrid Hypercrosslinked Polymer.

Abstract

A method enables the encapsulation of organic and inorganic phase change materials (PCMs) simultaneously has not been reported though a range of research has been dedicated to solving the leakage problems of PCMs during energy storage process. In this work, an organic/inorganic hybrid silioxyl functional group containing polymer was synthesized and applied to encapsulate PCMs. Owing to the mild hypercrosslinking reaction conditions, which only require the addition of catalytic amount of aqueous alkali solution, renders it to be tolerance towards both organic and inorganic PCMs. It is noteworthy that the initial homogeneous state of the reaction mixture allowed the ultimate PCMs encapsulation rate and the uniform blending of the third nano-additives with the aim of thermal conductivity enhancement. Further study reveals that the presence of this hybrid polymers endows a unique self-cleaning property to the obtained phase change composite that it displays a good hydrophobicity to water droplets. More importantly, this novel PCMs encapsulation protocol displays good tolerance towards varies of nanoparticles, including carbon-based nanomaterials, metal oxide nanoparticles and inorganic oxide nanoparticles, which enables an utmost 600% thermal conductivity enhancement and 93.7% light-to-thermal conversion efficiency with a latent heat of 180 J/g without leakage.