Long-Term Autonomic Thermoregulating Fabrics Based on Microencapsulated Phase Change Materials

Abstract

Microcapsules loaded with n-docosane as phase change material (mPCMs) for thermal energy storage with a phase change transition temperature in the range of 36–45 °C have been employed to impregnate cotton fabrics. Fabrics impregnated with 8 wt % of mPCMs provided 11 °C of temperature buffering effect during heating. On the cooling step, impregnated fabrics demonstrated 6 °C temperature increase for over 100 cycles of switching on/off of the heating source. Similar thermoregulating performance was observed for impregnated fabrics stored for 4 years (1500 days) at room temperature. Temperature buffering effect increased to 14 °C during heating cycle and temperature increase effect reached 9 °C during cooling cycle in the aged fabric composites. Both effects remained stable in aged fabrics for more than 100 heating/cooling cycles. Our study demonstrates high potential use of the microencapsulated n-docosane for thermal management applications, including high-technical textiles, footwear materials, and building thermoregulating covers and paints with high potential for commercial applications.

Enhanced Thermal Conductivity of Phase Change Microcapsules Based on Boron Nitride/Graphene Oxide Composite Sheets

“…3 For instance, as intermediate energy storage media, the TES systems can improve the harvesting efficiency of intermittent clean solar and wind energy as well as the utilization of off-peak electricity; as thermal management systems, the TES systems can adjust the temperature of textiles and buildings to a comfortable range, thus reducing energy consumption. So far, TES materials have been widely applied in many advanced military and civil fields, such as personal thermal management, 4,5 newenergy batteries, 6 solar−thermal conversion systems, 7 electronic devices, 3 infrared stealth, 8 wearable applications, 9 and buildings. 10 As one of the most widely used TES materials, latent heat storage materials, namely, phase change materials (PCMs), have attracted intensive interest, thanks to their unique high energy storage and thermostatic capacities.…”

Minireview on Design of Flexible Composite Phase Change Materials to Various Energy Applications: Progresses and Perspectives

“…PCMs will undergo solid–liquid phase transition during use, and there are significant problems of easy leakage and unstable morphology, which seriously restrict the practical applications of PCMs. , To solve the leakage problem of PCMs, researchers have mainly prepared shape-stable composite PCMs (SS-CPCMs) to encapsulate PCMs. Grossman et al, Shchukin et al, , Moth-Poulsen et al, , Zou et al, Sun et al, , Li et al, Zhang et al, Wang et al, , Yu et al and Tang et al have made outstanding achievements in the research of SS-CPCMs and have laid a solid foundation for the development and progress of SS-CPCMs and PCEST.…”

Fabrication and performance of phase change microcapsules with fatty acid monoglyceride based waterborne polyurethane as the shell

“…The melting enthalpy of microcapsules was 80.9 J g −1 , and the encapsulation efficiency was 73.9%. Paula et al 30 prepared phase change microcapsules with n ‐dodecane as the core material and polyurethane synthesized from 4,4′‐ diphenylmethane diisocyanate (MDI) and PEG1000 as the shell material by microemulsion interfacial polymerization. The melting enthalpy of microcapsules was 76 J g −1 .…”