Honeycomb carbon fibers strengthened composite phase change materials for superior thermal energy storage

• DOI: 10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2019.114493
• Publication Date: 2019-10-05T17:51:40Z
• Authors: Nan Sheng; Zhonghao Rao; Chunyu Zhu; Hiroki Habazaki
• Keywords: Thermal Stability; Carbon nanofoam; Phase-change material; Carbon fibers

Abstract Phase change materials (PCMs) have shown promising applications for thermal energy storage and management. With the purposes of solving the critical leakage problem and improving the thermal conductive property of paraffin PCM, composite PCMs as-supported by carbon fiber bundles were fabricated by a simple vacuum impregnation. The porous and honeycomb-shaped carbon fibers were prepared by the direct carbonization of biomass sisal fibers. As beneficial from the carbon supporting scaffolds, the composites illustrated great thermal conductivity increasement (1.73 W m−1 K−1) over pure paraffin (0.25 W m−1 K−1). The composite PCMs show satisfying latent heat (192.2 J g−1 at a carbon ratio of 12.8%), good shape stability, favorable thermal reliability and cyclability. Moreover, due to the one-dimensionally arranged carbon fiber bundles, the composites also showed anisotropic thermal conductive property. All of those could reinforce the use of the low-cost sisal-derived carbon fibers as thermal conductive scaffolds to PCMs, which will promote their practical applications for advanced thermal energy storage in collecting solar energy and industrial waste heat.