Controlling the temperature of electronics under harsh conditions is important for vehicular, aerospace, and other industrial applications. Phase change materials (PCMs), such as paraffin, use latent thermal energy storage (LTES) to store large amounts of latent heat over small temperature ranges, and are being investigated for use in industrial sectors. However, PCMs have low thermal insulation capabilities so porous matrices with low thermal conductivities are often used to decrease the ...
Paraffin is an excellent phase change material (PCM) for latent heat storage, but it does not efficiently use stored energy because of its low thermal conductivity. In this study, nickel and copper foams were added to paraffin to enhance heat transfer. A Thermal Constants Analyzer measured the thermal conductivity of the paraffin composites using the transient plane source (TPS) method. The addition of copper foam enhanced the thermal conductivity of ...
Phase change materials (PCMs) can be used as heat sinks to manage high temperature fluctuations in electronics. In this paper, a heat sink was generated from a paraffin/expanded graphite composite PCM, and the thermal conductivities of the materials were measured using the transient plane source (TPS) method of the Thermal Analyzer. Results showed that the composite PCM had a significantly higher thermal conductivity than the pure paraffin....
The authors outline a method of enhancing the thermal properties of a paraffin phase change material through the addition of herringbone-style graphite nanofibers (HGNFs). It was found that the solid-phase thermal conductivity increased exponentially with the presence of HGNFs; however, a significant increase in the liquid-phase thermal conductivity was not observed until the concentration of HGNFs in the composite PCM reached a point above the percolation threshold. The volumetric heat ...
Two different sets of phase change materials were made by adding either graphene or exfoliated graphite nanoplatelets (xGnP) to paraffin in hot toluene. The thermal and stability properties of these newly synthesized composites were then studied using the TPS method. The addition of xGnP led to a higher thermal conductivity while the addition of graphene led to a higher electrical conductivity. Graphene was found to be better at stabilizing the ...
