T-history method: The importance of the cooling chamber to evaluate the thermal properties of Glauber's salt-based phase change materials

Abstract

Phase change materials (PCMs) are very interesting latent heat storage systems used for various thermal energy storage applications, such as in energy-conserving buildings. Both organic compounds (such as paraffins) and inorganic compounds (such as hydrated salts) were tested in this field. Since they are often heterogeneous materials because of additives, the study of their thermal properties is now addressed from the conventional calorimetry to new methods based on more significant samples to better describe the heterogeneous structure, such as the T-history method. It requires a simple and inexpensive unit, but this equipment is not commercially available and must be set up in a laboratory. Consequently, this method does not have a standard configuration and it is continuously improving. One of the critical units of the T-history-based equipment is the cooling chamber and its operating conditions, whose choice influences the results. In this work, three different cooling chambers were used in the analysis of the thermal properties of hexadecane and Glauber's salt-based PCMs in order to verify the reliability and reproducibility of each system.