Al-Sn Miscibility Gap Alloy produced by Power Bed Laser Melting for application as Phase Change Material

Advanced Materials and Additive Manufacturing for Phase Change Thermal Energy Storage and Management: A Review

“…[ 124 ] In a solid‐liquid transition of a metal PCM, Confalonieri et al capitalized on the low miscibility of tin within aluminum and the lower melting temperature of tin to achieve a transition enthalpy of 24 J g −1 at 230 °C. [ 123 ] Some special cases of powder‐based PCM composites exist where organic PCMs act as the binder during the powder fusion process. In a series of studies carried out by Nofal, et al, paraffin was used as both the PCM and the binder in combination with expanded graphite (EG) for laser sintering into multilayer composites in a variety of shapes that were 80% paraffin by weight and exhibited transition enthalpy of 155 J g −1 and thermal conductivity of 0.85 W m −1 K −1 .…”

“…[124] Another case of metal PCMs used a printed aluminum-tin alloy where tin was the PCM given its comparatively low melting temperature. [123] Other niche PCMs include a thiolated octadecane derivative and stearyl acrylates, which are derivatives of the fatty acid stearic acid intended for chemical grafting and polymerization. [125,130,131,133]…”

“…In AM PCM devices, aluminum-silicon alloys, commonly containing magnesium, have been the most widely used due to their high strength-to-weight ratio, corrosion resistance, and ease of powder processing through laser sintering. The most common alloy is AlSi10Mg, [86][87][88]134,135,137,141,[144][145][146]150,152,[160][161][162] but other aluminum-silicon formulations [142,143,148,154] and aluminum alloys [123,136,138,149,151,[157][158][159]168] have also been used. Other metals printed for PCM applications have included copper alloys, [139,159] steel alloys, [156,159] nickel alloys, [124] and titanium alloys.…”

A review of metallic materials for latent heat thermal energy storage: Thermophysical properties, applications, and challenges

“…They tested two prototypes, Al-Sn and Fe-Cu, claiming that these systems can compete with conventional PCMs due to their high thermal conductivity, high energy density, corrosion resistance, and stability. Recently, Confalonieri et al [56,[108][109][110] studied the production methods for MGA based on Al-Sn as phase change material finding the Al-40Sn (wt.%) the most promising alloy. Another newly studied application for metal alloys is their nano-encapsulation to enhance thermal conductivity and thermal storage of conventional PCM as molten salts [111].…”

“…In the last years, much of the research efforts in phase change materials have mainly focused on the characterization of thermophysical properties of organic and salt hydrate; for metallic materials, the data found in the literature is incomplete and discrepant [46,47]. Recently, new promising utilizations of metals and alloys for thermal energy storage has appeared in different research areas: miscibility gap alloys [48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56], metal-organic framework and shape-stabilized PCMs [57][58][59][60][61], encapulation [62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69].The present work aims to provide an extensive and detailed compilation and analysis of the thermophysical properties of metals and alloys as phase change materials. The information presented includes the fundamental thermophysical properties, the temperature dependence of critical properties from the engineering design point of view, a summary of potential applications, and the main challenges of metallic PCMs.…”