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Sodium acetate trihydrate (SAT) can be used as phase change material in latent heat storage with or without utilizing supercooling. The change of density between liquid to solid state leads to formation of cavities inside the bulk SAT during solidification. Samples of SAT which had solidified from supercooled state at ambient temperature and samples which had solidified with a minimal degree supercooled were investigated. The temperature dependent densities of liquid and the two types of solid SAT were measured with a density meter and a thermomechanical analyzer. The cavities formed inside samples of solid SAT, which had solidified after a high or minimal degree of supercooling, were investigated by X-ray scanning and computer tomography. The apparent density of solid SAT depended on whether it solidified from a supercooled state or not. A sample which solidified from a supercooled liquid contained 15% cavities and had a density of 1.26 g/cm 3 at 25 °C. SAT which had solidified with minimal supercooling contained 9% cavities and had a density of 1.34 g/cm 3 at 25 °C. The apparent densities of the solid SAT samples were significant lower than the value of solid SAT reported in literature of 1.45 g/cm 3. The density of liquid and supercooled SAT with extra water was also determined at different temperatures.

The present work analyses the effect of radial thermal gradients inside T-history samples on the enthalpy temperature curve measurement. A conduction heat transfer model has been utilized for this purpose. Some expressions have been obtained that relate the main dimensionless numbers of the experiments with the deviations in specific heat capacity, phase change enthalpy and phase change temperature estimations. Although these relations can only be strictly applied to solid materials (e.g. measurements of shape stabilized phase change materials, SSPCM), they can provide some useful and conservative bounds for the deviations of the T-history method. Biot numbers emerge as the most relevant dimensionless parameters in the accuracy of the specific heat capacity and phase change enthalpy estimation whereas this model predicts a negligible influence of the temperature levels used for the experiments or the Stefan number.