Effects of Addition of Multi-Wall Carbon Nano-Tubes on Supercooling Of N-Hexadecane
Abstract
In recent years, microencapsulated phase change material (MPCM) slurry and PCM emulsion have been investigated for building heating and cooling applications in view of their potential thermal performance and utilization flexibilities (Farid et al. 2004, Zhu, Ma and Wang 2009, Huang, Petermann and Doetsch 2009). However, one of the major problems in using the PCM as thermal storage material is supercooling, i.e., when a PCM liquid is cooled, freezing usually occurs at a lower temperature than the melting point. As the latent heat is only released below the supercooled temperature, large temperature difference between charging and discharging is needed to fully utilize the latent heat, which is undesirable for the energy efficiencies of energy storage applications (Zhang et al. 2005).