Novel Hybrid Hypercrosslinked Polymer Assisted Highly Efficient Thermal Energy Storage

Abstract

Abstract Though a range of methods has been dedicated to solving the leakage problems, a versatile method which can meet with the organic and inorganic phase change materials (PCMs) simultaneously still have not been seen. In this work, an organic/inorganic hybrid Silioxyl functional group containing polymer was synthesized and applied to encapsulated PCMs. Owing to the mild hypercrosslinking reaction conditions, which only requires the addition of catalytic amount of aqueous alkali solution, renders it to be tolerance towards both organic and inorganic PCMs. More importantly, the homogeneous state of the initiate state of the mixture allowed the ultimate PCMs encapsulation rate and the uniformly 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 towards water droplets. More importantly, this novel PCMs encapsulation protocol shows a good tolerance with varies of nanoparticles, including carbon based nanomaterial, 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 the observation of any leakage.