Phase Change Materials & Devices

Phase change material (PCM) based thermal energy storage (TES) has many current and potential applications such as the heating and cooling of buildings, battery and electronics thermal management, thermal textiles, dry cooling of power plants and transportation of pharmaceutical and medical supplies.

Tuning of the transition temperature of a material using an external stimulus such as pressure or an electric field is a non-trivial task as the magnitude of the required stimulus is typically very high. To circumvent this problem here we developed the dynamic tunability of the transition temperature of a PCM using ions.

Tunable Phase Change Materials (PCM) Schea=matic — a) A schematic depicting impact of changing ambient temperature (either diurnally or seasonally) on utilization of static and tunable TES exposed to ambient temperatures. If the ambient temperature is too cold as compared to the transition temperature of the static PCM then no phase change will take place. If the ambient temperature is too hot as compared to the transition temperature then the PCM will be very quickly change phase melt and will remain in molten state without providing much benefit. Therefore, ideally the transition temperature of PCM should be closely matched with the ambient temperature.

b) Schematic of the dual-ion battery for dynamic tunability of the PEG PCM TES developed in this study.

Featured Publications

Lau, Jonathan, Joseph K. Papp, Drew Lilley, Piyachai Khomein, Sumanjeet Kaur, Christopher Dames, Gao Liu, and Ravi S. Prasher."Dynamic tunability of phase-change material transition temperatures using ions for thermal energy storage."Cell Reports Physical Science 2.10 (2021) 100613. DOI