Development of polymeric insulating foams for low‐temperature thermal energy storage applications

Abstract

Refrigeration plays an important role in several sectors in 21st-century life, such as food, air conditioning, healthcare, industry, and energy. In food industry it plays a vital role for reducing the post-harvest losses and in the preservation of food products. In this paper different amounts of a microencapsulated paraffin having a melting temperature of À10 C were used as phase change material (PCM) for the preparation of multifunctional rigid polyurethane foams (PUF) for refrigeration applications. The processability issues, the microstructural and thermo-mechanical properties of the resulting panels were comprehensively investigated. Morphological analysis evidenced a tendency of the incorporated PCM to damage the original closed cell structure of the PUF, and a fully open-cell microstructure was obtained for PCM contents higher than 20 wt%. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) evidenced a proportional correlation between the PCM concentration while the thermal energy storage efficiency of the prepared panels was also confirmed by monitoring the trend of the inner temperature in cubic specimens subjected to programmed heating and cooling ramps. Concerning the mechanical response, flexural tests evidenced that the stiffness of the foams was not substantially influenced by the PCM content, while a heavy drop of the failure properties was detected.

Influence of the Foaming Process on the Burning Behavior of the PET–PEN Copolymer

“…The polymer foam expands its applications in the areas of building insulation, aircraft, automobile, and packaging materials through its light weight, high heat resistance, and noise reduction characteristics. − Recently, it enlarged its uses to thermal energy storage, − energy harvesting, − and bioengineering. − …”

Metal foams: A review for mechanical properties under tensile and shear stress

“…Applications of metal foams are now found in several areas, such as the Buonomo et al, 2022;Sunder Sharma et al, 2022), building construction (Salimon et al, 2005;Bisht et al, 2019;Farhadi et al, 2020;Chibani et al, 2021;Song et al, 2021), aerospace (García-Moreno, 2016;Murugesan and Mansuri, 2018;Zhu et al, 2018;Madhavan et al, 2019;Liu et al, 2022) and chemical industry (Sajid Hossain and Shabani, 2015;Allioux et al, 2020;Du et al, 2020;Hu et al, 2021;Chen et al, 2023), bio-medical (Singh et al, 2013;Maimouni et al, 2020;Tong et al, 2020;Alavi et al, 2021;Rodriguez-Contreras et al, 2021), energy storage (Lafdi et al, 2008;Huang et al, 2019;Lei et al, 2021;Galvagnini et al, 2022;MERT et al, 2022), the list not being exhaustive. The uptake from the industry is still low though, due to relatively costly scaling production issues and the absence of reliable mechanical property evaluation.…”