Preparation And Properties Of Stearic Acid/S_IO₂Composite Phase Change Material

With the world’s energy crisis becoming more and more serious, and energyshortage has resulted in a big contradiction between energy supply and demand.Energy development and utilization attracted much attention recently, one of thehottest research areas are new energy resources developing and energy saving.Phase change energy storage technology can be used to solve the contradictionbetween energy supply and demand, thus phase change energy storage technologyis contributable to protect environment and improve the energy efficiency.Thispaper prepared composite phase change material consist of organic phase changematerial and inorganic silica matrix through Sol-gel method, and the organic phasechange material uniformly embedded into the silica network structure.In this paper, we prepared composite phase change material through Sol-gelmethod with tetraethoxysilane, water, alcohol and stearic acid as starting material.Composites were characterized by X ray diffraction analysis, scanning electronmicroscope, DSC and FT-IR analysis. The results show that the sol-gel methodoperation is simple and easy to control, the as-prepared samples are relativelyuniform with high purity. The as-prepared PCM shows a porous structure, andexhibits a higher storage capacity and lower transition temperature when comparedwith the original material, thus increased the energy efficiency. The composite thatcontains35%PCM by weight has a thermal energy storage capacity of64.23J/gand a phase transition temperature of51.81oC, and proved a better stability. Thispaper also discussed the influences of experimental conditions on the properties ofxerogel and PCM composite, optimized the technological line for preparation of thePCM.